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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
night, and when they were already in latitude 75°. This was the highest 
point to which the Hansa reached. Following this vessel alone now, we 
are told various tales, all of which record the extreme cold, the violent storms, 
and the various efforts made by the men to manage this extremely small 
and, we should think, unsatisfactory vessel. We do not think that the 
captain, Herr Hegemann, left anything undone which could have saved her. 
However, it was in vain. The vessel lay in a mass of ice ; great blocks, many 
of them higher than her deck, surrounded her; and*bf course, under the 
combined pressure of the ice and her weak condition (she was not iron- 
bound, as was the Germania ), she eventually became so leaky that the 
captain saw she must become a total wreck. Here was a condition ! The 
crew had, of course, to leave the ship, which was fast sinking, and to set up 
a home of some kind in the huge wilderness of ice in which they were, and 
which was simply and solely the frozen ocean. What an awful condition to 
be reduced to ! Yet they all bore it bravely. They set to work with a will, 
getting as many things as possible overboard, but still compulsorily allowing 
a considerable quantity of coal and other materials to remain within the 
sinking ship. At last they had got all they could collect from her on to the 
ice, and they saw her go down beneath it, with the great bulk of all their 
scientific apparatus and natural history collection. Their lives were now 
utterly unprotected, and from this period — night between October 21 and 
22 — they remained residing upon and carried southward with the ice till 
May 7, 1870. Now this period is full of adventures of all kinds, and it 
is faithfully and well described in the pages of this volume. They, of 
course, saved their boats, and in these, having abandoned the floe, they 
travelled south to the island of Illindlek, which they reached on June 4, 
1870. On June 13 they arrived at Fredericksthal, where they stayed some 
time, making a series of excursions, and from which they were eventually 
taken by a small vessel to Copenhagen, whence they reached Hamburg on 
September 3, 1870 — a time when, indeed, they must have been struck with 
wonder and astonishment, for on that day the news of the mighty battle of 
Sedan flew over nearly every civilised country in the world, and must 
unquestionably have astounded these patient explorers who had travelled 
from the polar world. Thus ended one part of the expedition. 
The explorations of the Germania were, as we might have expected, from 
her better build, larger size, and steam appliances, infinitely more successful. 
In the first instance we may state that the Germania reached a latitude as 
high as 77°, being, in point of fact, considerably north of Cape Bismarck. 
Very interesting are the descriptions of the scenery, and the admirable 
plates, some coloured, that occur in this part of the volume. The explorers, 
of course, did not do very much during the earlier part of the winter, for 
they were obliged to harbour their ship at Sabine Island, and build a series 
of walls of ice around her, to protect her hull. Then follows a long account 
of the various occurrences and pastimes by which the ship’s crew managed, 
to pass through the depths of winter; and this account of the period 
during which the days and nights were completely given up to darkness is 
interesting in the extreme. About the beginning of March, however, the 
explorers thought of going further north, and so they set out with a sledge, 
which, in the absence of dogs, was drawn by themselves for more than three 
