536 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. ' 



of several papers that were published in the " Transactions " of the 

 Academy of Sciences and of the Geological Society. He made con- 

 stant endeavors to enlarge the collections, with the result that by the 

 aid of the Swedish mineralogists and of the students, who co-oper- 

 ated with him, and in consequence of the extraordinary richness of the 

 Scandinavian Peninsula in rare and valuable minerals, the cabinet has 

 become one of the most considerable in Europe. 



In 1861 he took part in the second expedition of Torell to Spitz- 

 bergen, expecting with that to end his excursions toward the pole, and 

 with that view married, in 1863, a Finnish lady, Anna Mannesheim, 

 daughter of ex-President Count Carl Mannesheim. He had, however, 

 already, in December, 1862, crossed on the ice from Sweden to Fin- 

 land, in order to make some investigations on the formation of sea-ice ; 

 and in 1864 he went with the third Swedish expedition to Finland, 

 the business of which was connected with the measurement of the arc 

 of the meridian. His destiny to become an Arctic explorer seems to 

 have been settled with this enterprise, and from it may be dated the 

 beginning of a purpose to conduct explorations on his own account 

 and after his own plans. The next year found him engaged in mineral 

 investigations in Sweden and Finland. In 1867 he went to Paris 

 as a member of the International Metric Commission, attended the 

 Exposition, and made the acquaintance of the men of science of the 

 south. 



In 1868 ISTordenskiold went out as the head of the fourth Swedish 

 Arctic expedition, to which Mr. Oscar Dickson, the patron of his later 

 voyages, first gave his generous aid. In this voyage he sought to get 

 as near to the pole as possible, and the sensational achievement of it 

 was that the Sophia reached a higher latitude (81 42') than had 

 been attained by any vessel in the old hemisphere. Far more scien- 

 tific importance is attached to the fact that the expedition brought 

 home a rich collection of the fossil plants of the Arctic regions, con- 

 cerning which but little had previously been known. Another expedi- 

 tion, in which Nordenskiold was accompanied by Dr. Berggren, was 

 dispatched to Greenland in 1870, having for its principal object to as- 

 certain whether the Esquimau dogs could be relied upon for long 

 sledge- journeys. This question was decided in the negative, but the 

 expedition brought forth scientific fruit second in value to that of no 

 other single one, in that it gave an opportunity to the brave student 

 who led it- to examine the remarkable ice-formation of the interior of 

 Greenland, and that it led to the discovery of the celebrated large 

 blocks of meteoric iron of Ovifak, concerning the origin of which a 

 lively scientific controversy has arisen, and which, the explorer himself 

 suggests, may at some future time " form the starting-point for quite 

 a new theory of the method of formation of the heavenly body we in- 

 habit." 



Concerning the ice-formation, Baron Nordenskiold has written : 



