AVERTED INTEREST 
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sion which shook America the plans for an expedition to 
the South Pole fell unheeded to the ground. The Civil 
War broke up the small band of Americans interested in 
such matters. Wilkes and Maury found themselves 
no longer brothers-in-arms but fighting against each 
other, the former afloat in the United States Navy, the 
latter organising the defence of the Confederate shores. 
The life of His Excellency Professor Georg von Neu- 
mayer, a disciple of Maury’s, exhibits an extraordinary 
pertinacity in the advocacy of the renewal of Antarctic 
work for more than half a century. If there be any 
truth in the saying: 
“ ’Tis not what Man Does that exalts him, 
But what Man Would do.” 
Neumayer should take one of the highest places amongst 
those who strove to unbar the gates of the South, and 
if the name of a cherished locality is ever engraved by 
the earnest thought of years upon a human heart Dr. von 
Neumayer’s is surely marked broad with the word 
Siidpol. 
On taking his degree in 1849, Georg Neumayer’s 
mind was full of the exploring voyages of Ross, Wilkes, 
and Dumont D’Urville, and the scientific deductions of 
Gauss and Sabine. Resolved to pursue his studies in 
terrestrial magnetism and in the science of the ocean, and 
not without the ambition of aiding a United Germany to 
arise and grow into a maritime Power, he made a voy- 
age to South America in a Hamburg ship in order to 
acquire a practical knowledge of nautical astronomy and 
navigation. On his return he passed his examination as 
Mate, and spent several months in the effort to obtain a 
post in the Austrian Navy, Austria being then the most 
