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OCR
86 LIGHI AND WATER contain nothing but what it gains from the atmosphere, and it is distilled without the chance of those impurities which may exist in the vessels used in an artificial operation. We cannot well examine the water precipitated from the atmosphere as rain without collecting it in vessels, and all artificial contact gives more or less of contamination; but in snow, melted by the sunbeams, that has fallen on glaciers, themselves formed from frozen snow, water may be regarded as in its state of greatest purity. Congelation expels both salts and air from water, whether existing below, or formed in, the atmosphere; and in the high and uninhabited regions of slaciers, there can scarcely be any substances to contaminate. Removed from animal and vegetable life, they are even above the mineral kingdom; and though there are instances in which the rudest kind of vegetation (forms of the fungus or mucor kind) is even found upon snows, yet this is a rare occurrence; and red snow, which is occasioned by it, is an extraordinary and not a common phenomenon towards the pole, and on the highest mountains of the globe. Having examined the water formed from melted snows on glaciers in different parts of the Alps, and having always found it of the same quality, I shall consider it as pure water, and describe its characters. Its colour, when it has any depth, or when a mass of it is seen through, is bright blue; and, according to its greater or less depth of substance, it has more or less of this colour: as its insipidity and its other physical qualities are not at this moment objects of your inquiry, I shall not dwell upon them. In general, in examining lakes and masses of water in high mountains, their colour is of the same bright azure. And Captain Parry states, that the water on the Polar ice has the like beautiful tint. When vegetables grow in lakes, the colour becomes nearer sea green, and as the quantity of impregnation from their decay increases—greener, yellowish-green, and at length, when the vegetable extract is large in quantity—as in countries where peat is found—yellow, and even brown. To
