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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
dividends in the form of pelf to the shareholders, viz., the 
English taxpayers. There will, however, be a richer reward 
than any money can give, in the advancement of knowledge, 
the stimulus it will afford to enterprise, the training of our sea- 
men for future work, and the glory which will attach to the 
English naval name from the gallant deeds which are sure to 
be done in the far North by the officers and men attached to it. 
But still, if the expedition was to discover a vein of cryolite — a 
mineral only found in one spot in Greenland, and of such value 
that sometimes twelve or thirteen ships will load with it during 
the summer — in a locality sufficiently accessible, there are 
plenty of merchants in the city of London who would gladly 
pay the costs of the expedition for the privilege of working it. 
In zoology we must not expect too much. The researches of 
the expedition will be made in a very high northern latitude, 
where animal life is scarce. Perhaps the very scarcity of it 
makes the species which live there more interesting. The 
extreme northern range of animal or vegetable life is always 
valuable to know ; and accordingly every specimen, more especi- 
ally of the land fauna, will be an important acquisition to 
science. The sea even, in high northern latitudes, often swarms 
with the lower forms of life, particularly on banks, and there 
the zoologist might reap a rich harvest with the dredge. The 
sea is often thick with the most beautiful forms of acalephae, 
none of which can be preserved in a condition fit for identifica- 
tion or description. They must be described and drawn on the 
spot. A naturalist, skilful with his pencil and sufficiently in- 
structed in the subject to be capable of describing these animals 
accurately, might alone find sufficient for his labour, as day 
after day the vessel sails along, is 66 hooked on ” to an ice- 
field, or lies at anchor. Now-a-days naturalists are not so 
particular about having a long list of new animals, or rare 
species. They are more anxious about the range of particular 
forms of interest, about questions of structure, and other par- 
ticulars bearing on the philosophical questions of the day. 
These points can frequently only be made out by dissections 
on the spot. The large animals will afford plenty of material 
to the scalpel of the anatomist. What would a home-staying 
anatomist give, even to dissect on an ice-floe, a narwhal, or a 
white whale in a fresh or in any condition. He looks back with 
sadness to Barclay’s description of the white whale, the only one 
we have, and has a tradition that once a narwhal reached Scotland 
in brine, and was described by an anatomist who has not yet 
published his descriptions. The northern ranges of the birds, 
their nesting, their eggs, their changes of plumage, their 
parasites, and a dozen other points well known to the orni- 
thologist, would give even this unpromising department of 
