; but Rosset would
not stay a moment longer, and I was obliged to be content with that
result. He made himself very easy about the matter, and said we must
call it zero; and in the evening I heard him telling the maire that the
greatest of the wonders he had missed, by his patriotic care for his
neck, was a lake of water which did not freeze, though its temperature
was zero (centigrade).
Among the stones at the bottom of this water, I saw here and there
patches of a furry sort of ice. I have often watched the freezing of a
rapid Scotch stream, where, in the swifter parts, the ice forms first at
the bottom and gradually creeps up the larger stones till it appears on
the surface, and becomes a nucleus, round which pieces of floating ice
collect; and the substance in the glaciere-lake had exactly the same
appearance as the Scotch ground-ice. But it could not be the same thing
in reality, for, as far as I understand the phenomenon of ground-ice,
some disturbed motion of the water is necessary, to drive down below the
surface the cold particles of water, which become ice the moment they
strike upon any solid substance shaped like fractured stone;[75] the
specific gravity of freezing water being so much less than that of water
at a somewhat higher temperature, that without some disturbing cause it
would not sink to the bottom.
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