CHAPTER XXXV 
WEYPRECHT'S PLAN FOR SYNCHRONOUS OBSERVATIONS 
THE GREELY EXPEDITION 
On the 18th September, 1875, Lieutenant Weyprecht, 
the colleague of Lieutenant Payer when Franz Josef Land 
was discovered, delivered an address to a meeting of 
German savants at Gratz in which he urged that, in the 
greed for discovery, scientific research was often neglected. 
The object of Arctic expeditions, he said, should be a 
nobler one than mapping and naming ice-bound coasts, 
or reaching a higher latitude than a predecessor. The 
North Pole, he held, had no greater significance for science 
than any other point in the higher latitudes. His con- 
tention was that meteorological and magnetic observations, 
to be really valuable to science, must be synchronous' 
and that they must be taken at selected stations round 
the Arctic regions, the instruments identical, the instruc- 
tions identical, and the observations synchronous for at 
least a year. 
Lieutenant Weyprecht 's views received respectful 
attention, and were adopted by an international polar 
conference at Hamburg in 1879 and by another at 
St Petersburg in 1882. Proposals were then made to all 
the countries likely to take part, and finally the following 
arrangements were made to carry out Weyprecht's 
scheme. 
The United States agreed to station Lieutenant Ray 
at Point Barrow, and Lieutenant Greely at Lady Franklin 
Bay, in Smith Sound. The Austrians sent Captain 
Wohlgemuth to Jan Mayen Island, and the Germans 
Dr Giese to Cumberland Inlet in Davis Strait. England 
arranged for observations to be taken at Fort Rae on the 
Great Slave Lake, Russia established stations at Novaya 
Zemlya and at the mouth of the Lena, and the Danes sent 
Dr Paulsen to Godthaab in Greenland. The Swedes were 
