Captain Sabine's comparison, &c. 291 
day of arrival, to assign in the plan, the island which is in- 
tended to represent the one on which the Observatory is 
placed, or the position of the hill in question ; the latter, 
I apprehend must have been designed either by the one 
marked (a) in Captain Phipps’s, (or rather in Mr. D’ Au- 
vergne’s) plan, or by that marked f, although neither cor- 
responds, even within ordinary limits, in height, or in relative 
position. The present sketch, Plate XIII. is taken principally 
from a manuscript survey of Captain Beechey’s, when at 
Spitzbergen as a Lieutenant in Captain Buchan’s expedition 
of 1818 ; Captain Beechey’s Survey has been found remark- 
ably correct wheresoever we have had an opportunity of 
verifying it. 
The shore of the main land to the north eastward of the 
hill forms a small bay, which being frozen over, afforded a 
perfectly level base, in which no correction was required for 
inequalities of surface, and the consequent liability to error 
introduced in the reduction was avoided. Having stationed 
a line of poles in such manner as to cover each other exactly, 
by means of a telescope placed at the one extremity, the dis- 
tance between the extremes was carefully measured with a 
Gunter’s chain, by Mr. Henry Foster, of His Majesty’s 
Ship Griper, and myself, and was found to amount to 36 
lengths, or 2376 feet ; the chain was drawn along the surface 
of the ice at each remove, so that the links were prevented 
from entanglement; it was stretched at each repetition as 
tightly as two persons could draw against each other, and 
the spots marked by flat plates of iron, furnished with long 
spikes by which they were fixed securely in the ice; the 
temperature of the air was 35 0 , and of the chain 3 2 0 . In 
