HISTORY OF DISCOVERY. 115 



account has thus been given, must be regarded as one 

 of the most brilliant and famous of all voyages of dis- 

 covery that have ever been made. It is certainly remark- 

 able that, as compared with other travels and voyages, 

 that of Ross should be so much less universally popular. 

 While the achievements of such men as Barth, Nachtigall, 

 Livingstone, Stanley, Wissmann, in Africa, and in higher 

 latitudes, to name only a few, Parry, Franklin, Kane, 

 Weiprecht and Payer, and Nansen, have excited the 

 greatest and most widely-spread enthusiasm and interest, 

 the voyages of the younger Ross in the Antarctic regions 

 have never attained the wide appreciation they deserve, 

 however high the estimation in which they have always 

 been held by the scientist. The reason of this is, 

 doubtless, to be found in the fact that for the public 

 the greatest element of interest is invariably to be found 

 in man himself, and that for the larger number of readers 

 the chief attraction in travel centres in the contact with 

 new tribes, whether on the equator or near the pole ; 

 nor is the account of the life led by explorers in their 

 own narrow circle during the isolation of the polar winter 

 found to be less attractive. Descriptions of this sort 

 are entirely absent from Ross's Travels : his south polar 

 voyages were dedicated entirely to scientific research in 

 desolate tracts ; they were made in vast regions unin- 

 habitable by man, and consequently devoid of the element 

 most eagerly sought after by a public always on the alert 

 for something new. Perhaps it is not beyond the mark 

 to say that this lack of human incident, coupled with 

 an ignorance of the actual problems of scientific polar 

 navigation and discovery, have co-operated to retard 

 and check an intelligent interest in polar exploration. 



In the domain of science the results of Ross's travels 

 constitute, not so much a revolution as the first strictly 

 accurate data for modern geographical reasoning, to say 

 nothing of our extended knowledge of the distribution 



