10 
the North Magnetic Pole. One valiant explorer was found, 
long after his death, sitting hard frozen in the cabin of his 
ice-bound ship, his fingers still grasping the pen with which he 
wrote his last message,—a dramatic figure for the imagination 
to fasten upon. Though the North-West passage has been dis- 
covered at last, ‘‘ through peril, toil, and pain,” their lives not 
the man who has ever passed by it from ocean to ocean, and 
the dream of the Passage as a roadway for the wealth of the 
East has long faded away. The race for the Poles has, of 
course, no material ends to gain, but Science wants to know 
many secrets, meteorological, geological, and biological, which 
mother earth still hides under her polar ice-caps. In the 
Antarctic, navigators have yet to discover the magnetic curves, 
without a knowledge of which safe navigation in those regions is 
impossible. Mr Christy spoke of the vast ice cliffs, 200 feet in 
height, which render landing on the supposed Antarctic Con- 
tinent a practical impossibility, and he complained of the 
slackness of the British Government in subsidising scientific 
expeditions for Polar discovery. Yet the story he had to tell 
was full of the names of bold British sailors of the past, who, 
more than those of any other nation, had brought honour to 
their country by their discoveries. The lecture was illustrated 
by lantern slides. 
