112 LIGHT SCIENCE FOR LEISURE HOURS. 



latitudes to which it could have reached would have 

 been far higher than those to which Parry's party was 

 able to attain. For a moment's consideration will 

 show that the part of the great ice-field where Parry 

 was compelled to turn back must have been floating 

 in far higher latitudes when he first set out. He 

 reckoned that he had lost more than a hundred miles 

 through the southerly motion of the ice-field, and by 

 this amount, of course, the point he reached had been 

 nearer the Pole. It is not assuming too much to 

 say that a ship which could have forced its way round 

 the great floating ice-field would certainly have been 

 able to get within four degrees of the Pole. It seems to 

 us highly probable that she would even have been able 

 to sail upon open water to and beyond the Pole itself. 



And when we remember the direction in which 

 Dr. Kane saw an open sea namely, towards the very 

 region where Parry's ice-ship had floated a quarter of 

 a century before it seems reasonable to conclude that 

 there is open water communication between the seas 

 which lie to the north of Spitzbergen and those which 

 lave the north-western shores of Greenland. If this 

 be so, we at once obtain an explanation of the tidal 

 waves which Kane watched day after day in 1855. 

 These had no doubt swept along the valley of the 

 Atlantic, and thence around the northern coast of 

 Greenland. It follows that, densely as the ice may 

 be packed at times in the seas by which Hudson, 

 Scoresby, and other captains have attempted to reach 

 the North Pole, the frozen masses must in reality be 



