A Frenchman who was present in the room in which the Chemical Section of
the British Association met at Bath, and heard a paper which I read
there on this prismatic structure, suggested that it was probably
something akin to the rhomboidal form assumed by dried mud; and I have
since been struck by the great resemblance to it, as far as the surface
goes, which the pits of mud left by the coprolite-workers near Cambridge
offer, of course on a very large scale. This led me to suppose that the
intense dryness which would naturally be the result of the action of
some weeks or months of great cold upon subterranean ice might be one of
the causes of its assuming this form, and the observations at Jena would
rather confirm than contradict this view: competent authorities,
however, seem inclined to believe that warmth, and not cold, is the
producing cause.[209]
Professor Tyndall found, in the course of his experiments on the discs
and flowers produced in the interior of a mass of ice by sending a warm
ray through the mass, that the pieces of ice were in some cases
traversed by hazy surfaces of discontinuity, which divided the
apparently continuous mass into irregular prismatic segments.
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