Calder

“ You long for a shawl or a cloak; you draw yourself within yourself; you consult the thermometer, and are vexed to find that there is nothing there to be complained of,—it is standing most provokingly at the exact temperature that all the good books and good doctors pronounce to be the proper thing,—the golden mean of health; and yet perversely you shiver, and feel as if the face of an open fire would be to you as the smile of an angel. ”

“ In the middle of the night the cold was bitter, so cold that I had icicles hanging on my moustache and eyelashes. It was impossible to remain on the camels, and ill as we all felt we had to walk—drag ourselves would be a more suitable expression—to keep ourselves from freezing. On these cold nights we simply longed for the sun to come out. ”

“ This warming and cooling of the air is well illustrated by what takes place in a dwelling-house. If you pass out of a warm room, on a winter’s day, into the open air when there is no wind, you feel a sensation of cold. Whence does this sensation come? Not from anything you can see, for your feet, though resting on the frozen ground, are protected by leather, and do not yet feel the cold. It is the air which is cold, and which encircles you on all sides, and robs you of your heat; while at the same time you are giving off or radiating heat from your skin into the air. ”

“ Did you ever, in a raw, chilly day just before [23] a snowstorm, sit at work in a room that was judiciously warmed by an exact thermometer? You do not freeze, but you shiver; your fingers do not become numb with cold, but you have all the while an uneasy craving for more positive warmth. You look at the empty grate, walk mechanically towards it, and, suddenly awaking, shiver to see that there is nothing there. ”

“ Similarly air, although of the same temperature, as shown by the thermometer, will feel colder or warmer to us according to whether it is in motion or still; because when in motion it removes heat from our bodies quicker than when at rest, since more of it passes over our surface. ”

“ But we need not climb the Andes for an illustration; if we plunge one hand into a basin of hot, and the other into one of cold water, and then mix the contents of each vessel, and replace both hands in the mixture, we shall experience the sensation of heat and cold, from one and the same medium; the hand, that had been previously in the hot, will feel cold, whilst that which had been immersed in the cold water, will experience a sensation of heat. ”

“ If you take a red-hot ball out of a furnace and lay it down upon a frosty moor, two processes will go on—the ball will lose heat and the surrounding atmosphere will gain it. There are two ways by which you equalise the temperature of a hotter and a colder body: the one is by the hot one getting cold, and the other is by the cold one getting hot. If you are not heating the world, the world is freezing you. ”

“ How often the wind falls to a breeze, heat-tempering, grateful, which comes in fits and starts, not severe enough to chill, yet long enough to cool the body weary of the summer heats, with a sense of grateful relief. ”

“ I mean, my dear, that everything contains heat.
Daughter. Everything contains heat, mother, did you say? Why, then, is not everything warm? Some things, mother, are very cold; as ice, and snow, and that marble slab.
Mother. Yes, my child, everything contains heat, as I shall presently show you. When Alice goes to make a fire in a cold day, she does not carry the heat with her, and put it into the fire, nor into the wood, nor the coal, does she? ”

“ Farewell, sweet seat of innocence & mirth,
Where first my breast to youthful joys beat true:
O France! thou dearest region of the earth
And you, my early blissful days, adieu!
The bark that seems to bear me thus away.
Yet peans of me, poor exile, but a part;
In thy lov’d haunts, where I was wont to stray,
I've left the prime affections of my heart. ”

“ With every hot spell in America, when the thermometer was standing at 100°, their thoughts turned towards me in profound sympathy. While I have at times suffered with the heat and there have been times on the river, between high banks, cut off from the breeze, when I nearly fainted, and one occasion upon which I was quite overcome, yet as a rule I lived comfortably by day; and the nights are always cool. ”

“ A great pulse is produced either by some urgent necessity, such as an excess of heat in the heart requiring refrigeration, and, as it were, ventilation from without; or it may arise from leanness of the body, as we shall soon show. The excess of heat is occasioned either by natural causes, such as the ages of manhood and youth, or simply a hot season, place, or a warmer temperament; or by non-natural causes, such as the air which surrounds us being hotter than common, hot baths, exercises, food, wine, heating medicines ”

“ After hot weather, a day which is not very cold, will yet feel so to us, and after cold weather we shall be ready to think a day warm, which is not so severe as the preceding. [Pg 864] In winter, a thermometer in a sitting-room enables us to regulate its heat. Too great warmth produced by a fire is injurious to health, as it relaxes the strength, and consumes the pure oxygenous air, so necessary for respiration. ”

“ Thus discrimination of temperature is similar to discrimination of touch, which depends on more or less sudden change of pressure. The term cold means, physiologically, the sensation we experience when heat is abstracted, and the term heat, the sensation felt when heat is added to the part. Thus we are led to consider that the skin contains at least two kinds of specific terminal organs for sensations of touch and temperature, and two sets of nerve fibres which carry the nervous impulses to the brain. ”

“ The cold felt has little in common with the brisk, keen cold of a frosty day or that met with at a high altitude; but it has certain raw and penetrating properties, and the discomfort becomes hourly more acute, while at every moment the puddles suck and squelch beneath you, and fresh streams of colder water flow in from unexpected directions to chill you to the bone. ”

“ On the days—strange to say days when all was night—when the temperature fell to 20° and 30° below zero, cold was not complained of, but zero itself, with the wind-fiend raging, was misery that cannot be described. ”

“ Damp winds, though not colder by the thermometer, give a more uneasy sensation of cold than dry ones; because (to speak like an electrician) they conduct better; that is, are better fitted to convey away the heat from our bodies. The body cannot feel without itself; our sensation of cold is not in the air without the body, but in those parts of the body which have been deprived of their heat by the air. ”

“ Q. Why does wind in England generally feel cold?
A. Because a constantly changing surface comes in contact with our body, to draw off its heat.
Q. Why is a room (even without a fire) generally warmer than the open air?
A. As the air in a room is not subject to much change, it soon becomes of the same temperature as our skin, and no longer feels cold.
Q. Why do we generally feel colder out-of-doors?
A. Because the air (which surrounds us) is always changing; and as fast as one portion of air has become warmer by contact with our body, another colder portion surrounds us to absorb more heat. ”

“ She woke when he rose to feed the fire, and the current of cold air which swept in caused her to cover her mouth with the blanket. He turned toward her.
“It’s all over for sure, this time,” he said. “It’s cold and goin’ to be colder. How are you standing it? If your feet are cold I can heat a stone. How is the hurt foot?” ”

“ If you handle some snow with one hand, while you keep the other in your bosom, that it may be of the same heat as the body, and then bring both within the same distance of the fire, the heat will affect the cold hand infinitely more than the warm one. ”

“ From the sense of heat, again, we naturally derive the idea of a continuous scale or order, expressed by such terms as summer heat, blood heat, fever heat, red heat, white heat, in which all bodies may be placed with regard to their degrees of hotness, and we speak of the temperature of a body as denoting its place in the scale, in contradistinction to the quantity of heat it may contain. ”

“ If a hot iron is placed on a cold iron plate, we may observe that the plate is heated and the iron cooled until both attain appreciably the same degree of warmth; and we infer from similar cases that something which we call “heat” tends to pass from hot to cold bodies, and to attain finally a state of equable diffusion when all the bodies concerned are equally warm or cold. Ideas such as these derived entirely from the sense of heat, are, so to speak, embedded in the language of every nation from the earliest times. ”

“ Any one may observe what takes place when the body is immersed in cold water: first comes the sharp, half-pleasing, half-painful sensation of cold, almost immediately followed by a consciousness of internal warmth, the duration of which will be in proportion to the power of the organization to keep up this counteraction. ”

“ When the decomposition of vapour, from the decline of the heat, is as yet but in commencement, or while the electricity remaining in the air continues to give buoyancy to the suspended particles, a delicious calm often prevails for many days in succession, amidst a perfect sunshine, mellowed by the vaporous air, and diffusing a rich golden tint, as the day declines, upon the landscape. ”

“ Fifthly, The continued impression of heat makes us more sensible of cold. For when heat has rarefied the parts, and adapted them to a peculiar strength and frequency of vibrations, differing from the usual standard, the cold, whose difference from the usual standard lies on the other side, must raise a greater conflict, and produce a greater change, than if the parts had remained at the usual standard. The continued impression of cold must for the same reasons make us more sensible of heat. ”

“ Cold is simply the absence of heat, and when the body is surrounded by substances at a low temperature, heat is abstracted from its surface, and a certain painful and familiar sensation is imparted through the nerves of the skin. ”

“ We, ourselves, perspire freely, and therefore use only the hot air, but as Sir Erasmus says: “The great purpose to be arrived at, so far as temperature is concerned, is to obtain one which shall be agreeable to the sensations.” ”

“ The cold and moist air of England somewhat offended them; yet men who are born in hot regions can much better endure cold, than those of cold regions can bear heat; because violent heat dissolves the radical moisture of the human body, while cold concentrates and preserves it. ”

“ In some cases the temperature continues to fall after 41the bath. The real temperature is lessened even though the skin may glow, and may seem to possess increased warmth. Cold and heat are, within certain limits, wholly relative terms to the nerves of sensibility. What is warm at one time may be cold at another, though the temperature remains the same. The same temperature may be warm to one hand and cool to the other. Temperature can only be accurately determined by the thermometer. ”

“ Our clothes, contrived to guard us from cold, guarded us from the heat on the same principles. Underneath we were surrounded with an atmosphere of air, cooled on one side to 98 deg. by being in contact with our bodies, and on the other side heated very slowly, because woollen is such a bad conductor of heat. Accordingly I found, toward the end of the first experiment, that a thermometer put under my clothes, but not in contact with my skin, sunk down to 110 deg. ”

“ Though those who are in full vigor and fitly clothed can maintain their temperature in winter, and can digest additional food to make up for the loss of heat, it is otherwise with the feeble; and, as vigor declines, the beneficence of warmth becomes conspicuous. That benefits accompany the agreeable sensations106 produced by fresh air, and the agreeable sensations that accompany muscular action after due rest, and the agreeable sensations caused by rest after exertion cannot be questioned. ”

“ The temperature seemed to fall as we advanced into the Barrier, and this night the thermometer fell to 62 degrees below zero, which meant more shivering and even more discomfort, because now the moisture from our bodies and our breath formed ice in the fur of our sleeping-bags, especially at the head, hips, and feet. One can never forget the horrible ice-clammy feeling of one's face against the frozen fur. ”

“ Thus also have I seen persons put into a great heat by excessive action, and in the midst of that heat, strip off their clothes, and expose their open pores to the air. Nay, I have known some mad enough in this hot condition, to take huge draughts of cold water, or perhaps of milk and water, which they esteem much more cold in operation than water alone. ”

“ When every officer complained of cold, we claimed to anticipate the philosophers, Tyndall, Huxley, and the other physicists, in declaring that "heat is a mode of motion," and brisk bodily exercise will infallibly demonstrate the fact! ”

“ Cooling and non-stimulating drinks of a temperature of not less than 5° above the freezing-point might, on the contrary, be freely used in any enjoyable quantity, for the prevailing notions in regard to the danger of "cold drinks in the heat" prove nothing but the marvelous tenacity of popular superstitions. ”