A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 189 



digging up the body. A notion prevails among the masters 

 of the whale ships, that every disappointment and mi- 

 favourable accident of the voyage would ensue, were they 

 to permit any curious person to fetch the skull of a Green- 



tlie difficulty of access, whilst on the spot I felt it my duty, in the 

 cause of science, to record what I had observed. 



July 7: ther. 42°, 46°, 32°: wind N.E., nearly calm: the radi- 

 ation from S.W. still continues (10 a. m.) undiminished and very 

 beautiful : in the zenith comoid cirrus, and purpUsh-brovvn cirrostratus 

 suddenly forming in the horizon around: the weather delightfully 

 fine : at noon the atmosphere became cloudless, the radiation having 

 previously undergone a sudden solution into a milk-white hazy 

 suffused state, and disappeared : the great berg last noticed not far 

 distant: at one p. m. a single stream of cirrus sprung from S.W. 

 appearing to embrace the opposite point of the horizon, at which 

 moment I observed the thermometer at the degree noted as highest, 

 and almost instantaneously a thick fog advanced from the north- 

 ward. 



At four p. m. the cirrus streamers increased in the same direction 

 as the former, seeming to issue from an invisible corona in the S. W. 

 under which lay a reddish-brown mist of cirrostratus. In the north- 

 east point, at an elevation of about thirty degrees from the horizon, 

 a similar mist, with circular base, appeared to be the source of 

 corresponding streams of cirrus, which met the former in the zenith ; 

 and the meeting, or inosculation, as such an union has been called, 

 was productive of cirrocumulus, which was immediately formed in 



