Snow, indeed, actually nourishes animal life.  It holds in its bosom numerous animalcules:  you may have a glass of water, perfectly free from infusoria, which yet, after your dissolving in it a handful of snow, will show itself full of microscopic creatures, shrimp-like and swift; and the famous red snow of the Arctic regions is only an exhibition of the same property.  It has sometimes been fancied that persons buried under the snow have received sustenance through the pores of the skin, like reptiles imbedded in rock.  Elizabeth Woodcock lived eight days beneath a snow-drift, in 1799, without eating a morsel; and a Swiss family were buried beneath an avalanche, in a manger, for five months, in 1755, with no food but a trifling store of chestnuts and a small daily supply of milk from a goat which was buried with them.  In neither case was there extreme suffering from cold, and it is unquestionable that the interior of a drift is far warmer than the surface.  On the 23d of December, 1860, at 9 P.M., I was surprised to observe drops falling from the under side of a heavy bank of snow at the eaves, at a distance from any chimney, while the mercury on the same side was only fifteen degrees above zero, not having indeed risen above the point of freezing during the whole day.

Dr. Kane pays ample tribute to these kindly properties.  “Few of us at home can recognize the protecting value of this warm coverlet of snow.  No eider-down in the cradle of an infant is tucked in more kindly than the sleeping-dress of winter about this feeble flower-life.  The first warm snows of August and September, falling on a thickly pleached carpet of grasses, heaths, and willows, enshrine the flowery growths which nestle round them in a non-conducting air-chamber; and as each successive snow increases the thickness of the cover, we have, before the intense cold of winter sets in, a light cellular bed covered by drift, six, eight, or ten feet deep, in which the plant retains its vitality. ...  I have found in midwinter, in this high latitude of 78 deg. 50’, the surface so nearly moist as to be friable to the touch; and upon the ice-floes, commencing with a surface-temperature of-30 deg., I found at two feet deep a temperature of-8 deg., at four feet + 2 deg., and at eight feet + 26 deg.. ...  The glacier which we became so familiar with afterwards at Etah yields an uninterrupted stream throughout the year.”  And he afterwards shows that even the varying texture and quality of the snow deposited during the earlier and later portions of the Arctic winter have their special adaptations to the welfare of the vegetation they protect.