there was a vacant interval of eighteen inches in width interposed between them.  To prevent as much as possible, therefore, the injurious effects of this evil upon the health of the officers, I appointed certain days for the airing of their bedding by the fires, as well as for that of the ships’ companies.  Every attention was paid to Mr. Scallon’s case by the medical gentlemen, and all our anti-scorbutics were put in requisition for his recovery:  these consisted principally of preserved vegetable soups, lemon-juice, and sugar, pickles, preserved currants and gooseberries, and spruce beer.  I began also, about this time, to raise a small quantity of mustard and cress in my cabin, in small shallow boxes filled with mould, and placed along the stovepipe; by these means, even in the severity of winter, we could generally ensure a crop at the end of the sixth or seventh day after sowing the seed, which, by keeping several boxes at work, would give to two or three scorbutic patients nearly an ounce of salad each daily, even though the necessary economy in our coals did not allow of the fire being kept in at night.  The mustard and cress thus raised were necessarily colourless, from the privation of light; but, as far as we could judge, they possessed the same pungent aromatic taste as if grown under ordinary circumstances.  So effectual were these remedies in Mr. Scallon’s case, that, on the ninth evening from the attack, he was able to walk about on the lower deck for some time, and he assured me that he could then “run a race.”

At noon on the 7th, the temperature of the atmosphere had got down to 49 deg. below zero, being the greatest degree of cold which we had yet experienced; but the weather being quite calm, we walked on shore for an hour without inconvenience, the sensation of cold depending much more on the degree of wind at the time than on the absolute temperature of the atmosphere as indicated by the thermometer.  In several of the accounts given of those countries in which an intense degree of natural cold is experienced, some effects are attributed to it which certainly did not come under our observation in the course of this winter.  The first of these is the dreadful sensation said to be produced on the lungs, causing them to feel as if torn asunder when the air is inhaled at a very low temperature.  No such sensation was ever experienced by us, though in going from the cabins into the open air, and vice versa, we were constantly in the habit for some months of undergoing a change of from 80 deg. to 100 deg., and, in several instances, 120 deg. of temperature in less than one minute; and, what is still more extraordinary, not a single inflammatory complaint, beyond a slight cold, which was cured by common care in a day or two, occurred during this particular period.  The second is, the vapour with which the air of an inhabited room is charged, condensing into a shower of snow immediately on the opening of a door or window communicating with the