636 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



were conceived, the development of whicli has caused the nine- 

 teenth century to be so sharply distinguished from its predeces- 

 sors. Now knowledge of the earth is sought for itself, and in this 

 respect the polar research of the present has all at once assumed 

 another aspect, under which it is differentiated from that of the 

 past. Northwestern and northeastern passages have been sought 

 in our days, but not in order to reach India. When Maclure 

 achieved the former in 1852 and Nordenskjold the latter in 1879, 

 the value attached to the discoveries was not that they furnished 

 routes, but that a correct knowledge of the northern coasts of the 

 two continents and rich stores of other scientific information had 

 been gained by them. Fruits like those, no longer the interests 

 of trade, justified the high prizes which the English Government 

 offered for the discovery of the passage, and the costly expedi- 

 tions which were dispatched for that purpose. The early trade 

 routes became highways for scientific investigation, and the na- 

 ture of the polar regions as a whole was inquired into. Such ob- 

 jects were pursued by individuals. Scoresby, while hunting for 

 whales, made constant studies of the highest scientific value of 

 the hydrography, magnetism, and meteorology of the arctic re- 

 gions ; and so did Karl Ludwig Gieseke, afterward Professor 

 of Mineralogy at Dublin, who traveled through East and West 

 Greenland from 1807 to 1813 solely for the thorough study of the 

 geology of their coasts. 



Till 1860 the English, and afterward the Americans with 

 them, were in the front as polar explorers. The most important 

 results of their work were the discovery of the magnetic pole in 

 1831 by John and James Ross, the definition of the coast of arctic 

 America, and numerous single observations. More recently other 

 nations have come forward the Danes in Greenland, and the 

 Swedes, whose most illustrious representative is Nordenskjold. 

 Two German expeditions have been sent to East Greenland, an 

 Austrian expedition under Weyprecht and Preyer has discov- 

 ered Franz- Joseph Land, the Dutch have explored south of Spitz- 

 bergen, the Russians on the northern coast of Siberia, and now 

 with Nansen and Mohn the Norwegians have advanced to the 

 very front. In 1882-'83, at the instance of the German Neumayer 

 and the Austrian Weyprecht, a chain of observation stations was 

 established around the pole, to be kept up for a year an enter- 

 prise in which Germany, England, the United States, Russia, Aus- 

 tria, France, Sweden, Norway, and Finland took part. The year 

 1883 was further marked by Nordensjold's return from the inland 

 ice of Greenland, and by Nansen's conception of his scheme for 

 traversing Greenland on snowshoes, which he carried into effect 

 the next year. North polar research is therefore almost exclu- 

 sively the work of the Germanic nations, for the Russian ex- 



