1888-89.] 125 



In the far north, British enterprise has opened up a new 

 water-way from the Arctic Ocean to Central Asia. Captain 

 Wiggins for many years held the opinion that the Gulf Stream 

 flowed eastward, along the coast of Lapland, towards Nova 

 Zembla, and that this force, combined with the volume of the 

 rivers Obi and Yenisei, drove the ice to the north of the Kara 

 Sea, leaving the route through the Kara Straits open in the 

 summer months. This opinion he proved to be correct in 

 1874, by sailing through these straits to the mouths of the Obi 

 and Yenisei. In 1876 he ascended the latter river for a thou- 

 sand miles, and three years later he landed a cargo at the 

 mouth of the Obi. Last year, leaving Newcastle-on-Tyne on 

 5th August, on 9th October following for the first time a 

 British sea-going steamer landed her cargo in the very heart of 

 Siberia, at Yeniseisk, 2,000 miles from the mouth of the 

 Yenisei, and only a few miles from the Chinese frontier. Now 

 the Phoenix Company of merchant adventurers purpose estab- 

 lishing a fleet to communicate with the mouth of the Yenisei, 

 where cargoes would be transhipped to another fleet trading 

 upon the river, and the cargoes brought down by it taken on 

 board, thus dividing the journey, and allowing the return voy- 

 age to be made before winter sets in. By this route Central 

 Asia can be supplied with European commodities, and the vast 

 mineral wealth of Siberia brought into the market. 



The extension in the application of electrical science, girding, 

 as it now does, the globe with a series of submarine cables and 

 land lines, gives us information, within a few hours of their 

 occurrence, of those mighty outbursts of volcanic activity which 

 so seriously alter in many instances the configuration of our 

 earth. Chemical science, again, by patient investigation in the 

 laboratory, revolutionises entirely an extensive branch of trade, 

 determines the economic value and properties of newly disco- 

 vered natural products, and aids us in the determination of the 

 conditions under which the mineral components of our rocks 

 have been formed. In fact, all branches of natural and physi- 

 cal science are intimately interwoven, and I hold that the in- 



