But these people are all of them almost entirely naked; and they are dripping with perspiration, they are so warm. Outside of the hut, in the dim starlight, the air is actually a hundred degrees colder than freezing water. Yet inside, in the nearly as dim lamp light, there are almost as many degrees of warmth. The air is there as hot as the hottest summer day in England! All this heat is produced in the slow furnaces of those twelve individuals’ own living bodies. They have lost the sunshine for months, and everything around them is much colder than ice. They are living upon the flesh and blubber of seals, and sea-horses and white bears, animals which they killed before the sun went away, the meat being kept for them through their long winter by the preserving power of the frost. The sunshine of past away summers has given its heat to plants; the seals and sea-horses have fed on those plants, or upon smaller animals which have done so, and have transferred the heat into their own blubber; and now the benighted savages are getting the heat out of the blubber to keep their own flesh and blood warm and unfrozen. In that close hut, where no sunshine can come for months, the savage inmates have nevertheless abundant stores of the warmth of sunshine, which have been laid up and preserved for their service. Such care Providence takes even of these, the rude and barbarous children, whose lot he has cast in the desolate outskirts of the world!
The rude people who dwell in the cold frost-land of the north, remain warm through their long, severe winter, without the aid of artificial fires, because they economize the warmth which is produced in the slow furnaces of their bodies, and prevent it from being scattered away as quickly as it is generated. If they were to set themselves down in the open air, instead of in their close huts, the warmth produced in their bodies would be thrown off from the outer surfaces of these as fast as it was set free from the fuel. In the close huts, on the other hand, this warmth first heats the air contained within the stone walls, and is then a very long time in getting any further, and so prevents more heat from being rapidly scattered from the internal furnace.