342 SPITSBERGEN chap, xxv 



by any one who will row to some of the islands of Fair 

 Haven (Cloven Cliff or the Outer Norway for choice) and 

 scramble to the top. 



Farther than this to east or north it is not likely that 

 tourist steamers will often go, nor is it advisable that 

 persons with home engagements should risk the adventure 

 of a region in which it is always possible to be entrapped 

 by the ice. All the bays and fjords of the west coast, how- 

 ever, may be visited in safety by a traveller having an extra 

 week or two at his command, if the company should make 

 needful provision of small excursion steamers, as, I am in- 

 formed, they intend to do. A fair specimen of the Arctic 

 world is thus thrown open to every intelligent person, and 

 the horizon of every one's experience is thereby potentially 

 widened. 



The success of the Vesteraalen Company's experiment, of 

 course, depends upon the popular support it receives at 

 the hands of the touring public. The risk and the pecu- 

 niary profit is their affair. But there is another and a larger 

 profit which the success of this venture will bring to science, 

 and it is in the interest of this profit to science that I am 

 doing what I can to further the purely commercial interests 

 of the Company. Before the development of Switzerland 

 as a holiday resort the Alps were visited by men of science ; 

 but no one will assert that the minute knowledge we 

 now possess of the great Alpine range would have been 

 attained if the playground of Europe had been located else- 

 where. Scientific men have availed themselves of the 

 facilities afforded to tourists, and tourists in their turn, being 

 for the most part persons above the average in intelligence, 

 have created a demand for the information which scientific 

 men could supply. Thus the Alps have been surveyed as 

 no other range of mountains in the world has been surveyed, 



