OBJECTIONS. 03 



An important, criterion whereby to judge if one has open water, 

 is the ground swell of the sea. This is seen at Julianehaab, when 

 the ice from the east coast is expected in the spring. To look after 

 the ice itself from hills of some hundred feet in height is not of 

 much use, for if it be first in sight it is also very near, and in a 

 short time is on land. But in general one can know its proximity 

 by the cessation of the ground-swell several days beforehand. To 

 observe this with certainty the weather must be quite still, for the 

 swell which even a common wind produces makes the observation 

 uncertain. Kane adduces the swell and surge as proofs of the Open 

 Polar Sea ; but as it is expressly stated that it blew almost a storm 

 the whole time, the effects of such a storm on an open surface of the 

 sea, of possibly 20 or 30 miles in extent, are sufficient to make 

 the presumed observation perfectly invalid. Still more uncertain 

 does the observation of Morton appear to me, that the swell caused 

 by the wind from the north, which he pretends to have remarked 

 from the farthermost point of land, was acted on by another swell 

 from the east, behind that Cape which concealed the end of Green- 

 land and the beginning of the great Polar Sea from his view. 



A third fact which Kane adduces in favour of his theory of the 

 Polar Sea, is the increasing abundance of animals and plants in 

 the district to the north of the glacier. It is mentioned in par- 

 ticular that seals and sea-fowl were seen in great numbers in, as well 

 as around the neighbourhood of, the open water. Passing over the 

 more cursorily touched observation, that the birds flew in an eastern 

 direction behind the oft-mentioned cape which Morton could not 

 come past, I shall only remark that I, on the contrary, regard that, 

 flocking together of sea animals and birds as a sign of one single 

 opening in the sea, the rest of which was covered with ice. Such 

 openings are just characteristic gathering-places for seals and sea- 

 fowl. Nor do the plants which the Greenlander Hans is said to 

 have seen, but no specimens of which were collected, and which 

 from his bare description, are determined and inserted with Latin 

 names of their genera and species at page 462, appear to afford any 

 weighty proof of the Open Sea and an increasing mildness of climate 

 towards the North Pole. 



I now come to the real question, the knob to which Morton climbed 

 when he could not come farther, and from which ho, " as far as ho 

 could discern," found the sea Open. He says that it was over 500 

 feet in height, though he likewise remarks that the cliffs around, to 

 a height of 100 feet, which were difficult to reach, were quite per- 

 pendicular. As far as I can make out, this is the same point to 

 which Kane, at page 299, gives a height of 300 feet ; at page 305, 



