Fhe Northwest Passage, &c. 101 
ter of justice to the interests of American science, and particu- 
larly to Mr. Hare. 
BENJAMIN SILLIMAN, 
Prof. of Chemistry and Mineralogy in Yale College. 
Art. XXV. The Northwest Passage, the North Pole, and the 
, Greenland Ice. 
ly looking over the foreign journals, we find no articles of 
intelligence so interesting as those which respect the three sub- 
jects mentioned above. Indeed, as they have found their way 
into most of our hewspapers, it is now generally known in this 
Country, that, in consequence of the reported breaking up of 
the Greenland ice, an expedition has already left England, in 
two divisions, the one for the purpose of exploring a north- 
West passage to Asia, around the North American continent, 
by the way of Davis’s Straits; the other, for effecting the same 
object by passing over the north pole. 
If Horace thought that man almost impiously daring, who 
first adventured upon the open sea, what shall we say of the 
hardihood of the attempt to visit rue roLe?—the pole, which 
. oe 'mpossible to contemplate without awe—which, in all pro- 
uty, has never been visited by any living being—where the 
dreary Solitude has never been broken by human voice—where 
* Sound of war has never been heard, and darkness and cold 
“xert an almost undisputed dominion! “What must be the emo- 
ons of that man who first stands upon the point of the earth’s 
rr ‘who, no longer partaking of the revolution, in circles of 
atitude, slowly revolves on the axis of his own body, once in 
nty-four hours—to whom the sun does not rise nor set, but, 
pei. ™ a course very oblique to the horizon, makes scarcely 
eRe eneg Progress in twenty-four hours, and at the end of 
x tee when he has attained his noon, is only 23° 28° 
Nis te C of 4 vertical circle, above the horizon—to whom 
fork is extinct, and who can move in no possible direc- 
t south—to whom the stars are a blank, and to whom 
