222 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1926 
and a nonmagnetic stove which, in winter, brought the temperature 
up to about —10° F. The magnetic and other observations were 
taken in this house during the first winter, 1922-23. 
, The magnetic instruments were loaned to the expedition by the 
Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution 
of Washington, which had paid special attention to make them suit- 
able for use in the Arctic. The greatest improvement was that all 
metal parts which had to be touched by the fingers were covered 
with celluloid caps. If metal is touched at low temperatures by a 
cold finger, the result is frequently a white, frozen spot on the 
finger, but the celluloid caps could be handled without great incon- 
venience. The magnetic needles, however, could not be provided 
with celluloid protection, and they had to be handled with uncovered 
hands. They often left a white line which, later, when the observer 
returned to a heated room, turned black and caused “toothache” in 
the finger. AJl of us had blackened finger tips in the winter. 
Our crystal palace did not survive the Arctic summer; it melted 
in June, and in summer we had to take the observations in a tent. 
This observing tent was used during the entire winter of 1923-24 
because a new crystal palace, which had been built in October, 1928, 
disappeared when the ice broke to pieces around the ship at the end 
of the month, and because our surroundings later were constantly 
changing. Our tent undertook several independent expeditions as 
the ice broke between the ship and the tent and the parts on both 
sides of the crack were displaced in relation to each other. On one 
occasion we thought the tent was lost. The ice broke on Thursday 
afternoon, and the tent rapidly disappeared out of sight between 
hummocks and pressure ridges. Searching parties were out look- 
ing for it on Friday and Saturday, but without success. On Sunday 
Mr. Hansen, the mate, and I took a walk, following a lane which 
recently had been covered with young ice on which walking was 
easy. We thought we were going in the opposite direction to the 
one in which the tent was supposed to be, but about 2 miles from the 
ship we saw human tracks on an old ice-floe and an inspection soon 
revealed that we had encountered an old acquaintance, which previ- 
ously had been located close to the ship. Looking around, we saw 
the tent standing there unharmed; we took it down and carried it 
back to the ship in triumph. 
Continuous records of the magnetic elements could not be obtained 
on the drift ice because the ice fields were always moving, turning, 
and twisting, making a permanent orientation impossible. The 
conditions were different during the winter of 1924-25, when we 
were frozen in close to the coast on motionless ice. There we used 
a large tent for ordinary magnetic observations and installed an 
