EDITOR'S PREFACE, 



intrepid discoverer must encounter the same hardships, facing death 

 every minute and every hour on the return to civilization and home. 



We will assume that Dr. Cook or Commander Peary— the reader may 

 take his choicCj in his imagination, as to which one of these daring ex- 

 plorers is actually standing at the top of the world— stood astride the 

 North Pole with his right foot on the meridian of Greenwich and his left 

 on the 180th meridian. It is plain that so far as the terrestrial world 

 is concerned, he is facing southward in any direction he may look. 

 There is no east, west or north. Every direction is south. If he is 

 looking straight ahead his eyes are scanning along the 90th meridian 

 east of Greenwich and his back is toward the 90th meridian west of 

 Greenwich. Thus, we have the world quartered, so to speak. 



If he turns his eyes one-quarter of the way around to the right and 

 looks in the direction straight away from his right side, he is looking 

 directly down the meridian of Greenwich, or zero, which passes through 

 the Arctic Ocean almost midway between Spitzbergen and Greenland. 

 Farther south it extends through the North Sea until it crosses the ex- 

 treme southeastern side of England at Greenwich. Onward this imag- 

 inary line shaves off the extreme western side of France and the north- 

 easternmost comer of Spain, crosses the Mediterranean through Al- 

 geria, almost touching the southeastern corner of Morocco, and across 

 the Sahara desert in Africa. In the Gulf of Guinea in the South At- 

 lantic Ocean it crosses the equator. Here we are just one-half of the 

 distance from the North Pole to the South Pole. In its onward reach 

 to the South Pole, the meridian of Greenwich passes almost entirely 

 over water, so far as known. 



Now, if the explorer will turn his face from right to left as he stands 

 at the North Pole, his eyes will be looking in the direction of the 180th 

 meridian. This extends across the Arctic Ocean almost touching the 

 eastern end of New Columbia, or Wrangel Island, and then cuts off the 

 extreme end of Siberia, which projects into the Bering Strait. Now, it 

 passes through the Gulf of Anadir through the Bering Sea, across a 

 cluster of the Aleutian Islands, through the Pacific Ocean, where it 

 crosses the equator and extends onward across the Tropic of Capricorn 

 and beyond grazes the eastermost projection of New Zealand. This 

 makes New Zealand the eastermost civilized country of the world. It 



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