onsist of any organic substance, but of
crystallised grains of sand. I too now examined them more closely,
but unfortunately not until the morning after we had left the
ice-field, and then found that the supposed ooze consisted of pale
yellow crystals (not fragments of crystals) without mixture of
foreign matter. The quantity of crystals, which were obtained from
about three litres of snow, skimmed from the surface of the snow on
an area of at most 10 square metres, amounted to nearly 0.2 gram.
The crystals were found only near the surface of the snow, not in
the deeper layers. They were up to 1 mm. in diameter, had the
appearance shown in the accompanying woodcut, and appeared to belong
to the rhombic system, as they had one perfect cleavage and formed
striated prisms terminated at either end by truncated pyramids.
Unfortunately I could not make any actual measurements of them,
because after being kept for some time in the air they weathered to
a white non-crystalline powder. They lay, without being sensibly
dissolved, for a whole night in the water formed by the melting of
the snow. On being heated, too, they fell asunder into a tasteless
white powder. The white powder, that was formed by the weathering of
the crystals, was analysed after our return--21 months after the
discovery of the crystals--and was found to contain only carbonate
of lime.

[Illustration: FORM OF THE CRYSTALS. Found on the ice off the
Taimur coast. Magnified thirty to forty times. ]

The original composition and origin of this substance appears to me
exceedingly enigmatical. It was not common carbonate of lime, for the
crystals were rhombohedral and did not show the cleavage of calcite. Nor
can there be a question of its being arragonite, because this mineral
might indeed fall asunder "of itself," but in that case the newly-formed
powder ought to be crystalline. Have the crystals originally been a new
hydrated carbonate of lime, formed by crystallising out of the sea-water
in intense cold, and then losing its water at a temperature of 10 deg. or
20 deg. above the freezing-point? In such a case they ought not to have been
found on the surface of the _snow_, but lower down on the surface of the
_ice_. Or have they fallen down from the inter-planetary spaces to the
surface of the earth, and before crumbling down have had a composition
differing from terrestrial substances in the same way as various
chemical compounds found in recent times in meteo