3766 The Zoologist — November, 1873. 



to within a few miles of Cape Leigh Smith. They then turned 

 inland southwards, and endeavoured to reach Cape Moen over an 

 elevated tract of undulating table-land. Soon after their start one 

 of the men was almost lost in a crevasse, being kept up by only one 

 arm passed through his rueraddy (sledge-trace) ; so they provided 

 all hands with two rueraddies apiece, and these sufficed to keep 

 them from falling through the snow. But as they advanced towards 

 the opposite coast, the glaciers became so much broken up that at 

 last they determined to turn westward and leave Cape Moen alone. 

 For very manj' days they were unable to see anything but an un- 

 varied expanse of snow so similar to the floes that the first glimpse 

 of a bare mountain peak protruding above it caused the man 

 who viewed it to call out " I see land !" On fifty days out of the 

 sixty of their absence from the ship it snowed. They returned in 

 safety to Mossel Bay two or three days after our first visit there. 



Having disposed of all that is foreign to the title of my paper, 

 I will proceed to make some observations on the Vertebrates of 

 Spitsbergen. 



Mammals. 



Man. — There must be many hundreds, if not thousands, of men 

 buried in Spitsbergen. The graves are usually situated on a knoll 

 or a low ridge near a harbour ; and it sometimes happens that they 

 are found in good order. Here and there along the coast a solitary 

 grave may be met with close to the beach ; but, as a rule, they are 

 on higher ground. Their positions are various, not always by any 

 means east and west. A large proportion of them have collapsed, 

 either through the subsidence of the stones piled up over the 

 corpse, or in consequence of foxes having burrowed into them ; 

 and portions of skeletons are disclosed in the gaping coffin, pro- 

 trude between the rocl<s, and are plentifully scattered over the 

 surrounding soil. Sometimes the wood of the coffin has been used 

 for fuel, and the rarity of anything resembling a wooden cross from 

 graves dug (as many of them must have been) by Catholics of the 

 Eastern Church is perhaps to be accounted for on the same grounds. 

 On the 8lh of September I was returning to the ship along the 

 southern side of Green Harbour with our second engineer, James 

 Kidd. The object of our walk had been fossils and plants, and 

 we had met with moderate success. While we were looking 

 after a patch of Nardosuiia alpina, which we had found a 



