145 



NATURAL SCIENCE: 



A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress. 



No. 61. Vol. X. MARCH, 1897. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS. 



Franz Josef Land and its Explorers. 



IN reply to our note entitled " The Little Trip of the Fram," Mr, 

 Montefiore Brice has favoured us with a lengthy and character- 

 istic epistle, to the details of which we reply elsewhere. We are, 

 however, sure that Mr. Brice would wish us to give equal prominence 

 with our original note to a disclaimer of any wish to attack his friend 

 Mr. Jackson, either for the work he is doing, or for sentences in his 

 private correspondence. The person we felt called on to criticise was 

 Mr. A. Montefiore Brice. According to Mr. Jackson's letter, the 

 true position, by latitude and longitude, of Nansen's winter hut was 

 as far from Nansen's idea of its position as Paris is from Prague. 

 What was Mr. Brice's object in publishing that paragraph? Many 

 people thought he meant to insinuate that Nansen's latitudes and 

 longitudes could not be relied on. And we objected to discredit 

 being cast on Nansen by quotations from the private letters of " a 

 man who is," as Mr. Brice insists, " still at work in the Arctic Regions, 

 and unable to reply for himself" to the questions that are being asked. 



No amount of effusive laudation in other parts of Mr. Brice's 

 paper could prevent this damaging inference ; and while we are only 

 too pleased to learn from him that this inevitable conclusion was 

 incorrect, we cannot exonerate the Council of the Royal Geographical 

 Society from publishing these incompletely proved statements, which 

 might so easily have been laid hold of by would-be slanderers of 

 Nansen. Preliminary notices of this kind are as objectionable in 

 Geography as they are in Zoology. 



Mr. Brice quotes the president of the Geographical Society as 

 saying that " the value of such a survey " as Mr. Jackson's " can 

 hardly be exaggerated." But Sir Clements, it will be noted, used the 

 future tense ; and when at some future time we have Mr. Jackson's 

 results properly put before us, we shall be better able to appraise their 

 precise value. For the present, we need only compare them with the 

 magnificent opportunity offered him for obtaining information of great 



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