172 SCIENCE IN SHORT CHAPTERS. 



sloops of 30 to 40 tons burden, and only six or eight pair 

 of hands on board ; or by overland traveling as easily as the 

 Arctic winter journey between Tornea and Alten. This 

 trip over the snow-covered mountains is done in five or six 

 days, at the latter end of every November, by streams of 

 visitors to the fair at Alten, in latitude 70, 3^ degrees N. 

 of the Arctic circle ; its distance, 430 miles, is just about 

 equal to that which stands between the North Pole and 

 the northernmost reach of our previous Arctic expedi- 

 tious. One or the other of the above-named conditions, 

 or an enclosed frozen Polar ocean, is what probably exists 

 beyond the broken fjord barrier hitherto explored ; a con- 

 tinuation of such a barrier is, in fact, almost a physical 

 impossibility; and therefore the Pole will be ultimately 

 reached, not by a repetition of such weary struggles as 

 those which ended in the very hasty retreat of our last 

 expedition, but by a bound across about 400 miles of open 

 or frozen Polar ocean, or a rapid sledge-run over snow- 

 paved fields like those so merrily traversed in Arctic Nor- 

 way by festive bonders and their families on their way to 

 Yule-time dancing parties. 



Reference to a map of the circumpolar regions, or, better, 

 to a globe, will show that the continents of Europe, Asia, 

 and America surround the Pole, and hang, as it were, down- 

 wards or southwards from a latitude of 70 and upwards. 

 There is but one wide outlet for the accumulations of 

 Polar ice, and that is between Norway and Greenland, 

 with Iceland standing nearly midway. Davis's and Beh- 

 riug's Straits are the narrower openings : the first may 

 be only a fjord, rather than an outlet. The ice-block, 

 or crowding together and heaping up of the glacier frag- 

 ments and bay ice, is thus explained. 



Attempts of two kinds have been made to scale this icy 

 barrier. Ships have sailed northwards, threading a dan- 

 gerous course between the floating icebergs in the sum- 

 mer, and becoming fast bound in winter, when the nar- 

 row spaces of brackish water lying between these masses 

 of land ice become frozen, and the " ice-foot" clinging to 

 the shore stretches out seaward to meet that on the oppo- 

 site side of the fjbrd or channel. The second method, 



