I chatted with a peasant in the Haute Morienne, concerning the endemial
swelling of the throat, which is found in seven out of every ten persons
here: he told me what I had always heard, but do not yet believe, that
it was produced by drinking the snow water. Certain it is, these places
are not wholesome to live in; most of the inhabitants are troubled with
weak and sore eyes: and I recollect Sir Richard Jebb telling me, more
than seven years ago, that when he passed through Savoy, the various
applications made to him, either for the cure or prevention of blindness
by numberless unfortunate wretches that crowded round him, hastened his
quitting a province where such horrible complaints prevailed. One has
heard it related that the goîstre or gozzo of the throat is reckoned a
beauty by those who possess it; but I spoke with many, and all agreed to
lament it as a misfortune. That it does really proceed merely from
living in a snowy country, would be well confirmed by accounts of a
similar sickness being endemial in Canada; but of an American goîstre I
have never yet heard--and Wales, methinks, is snowy enough, and
mountainous enough, God knows; yet were such an excrescence to be seen
_there_, the people would never have done wondering, and blessing
themselves.

The mines of Derbyshire, however, do not very unfrequently exhibit
something of the same appearance among those who work in _them_; and as
Savoy is impregnated with many minerals, I should be apter to attribute
this extension of the gland to their influence over the constitution,
than to that of snow water, which can scarcely be efficacious in a
degree of power equal to the producing so very violent an effect.

The wolves do certainly come down from these mountains in large troops,
just as Thomson describes them: