Personal and Scientific News. 335 
Messrs. J. E. Spcrr, H. B. Goodrich and F. C. Schrader' 
of the United States Geological Surve}^ arrived in San Fran- 
cisco this week [Oct. 17, 1896 J. They were sent by the de- 
partment to Alaska last spring to report on the prospects of 
quartz mining in that region. They crossed the Chilkat pass 
and reached the upper Yukon about the middle of June. 
Going down the Yukon river, and pursuing their investiga- 
tions at the various raining settlements on their way, they 
reached Fort St. Michaels, at the mouth of the Yukon, three 
months ago. They believe tliat tlie prospects for profitable 
quartz mining are very good, and they will make a report to 
that effect. — [Eng. and Mining Journal.) 
The Peary Greenland Expedition op 1896. 
Lieut. Peary's expedition steamer Hope, which sailed in 
July with its party for scientific observations in Greenland, 
reached North Sydney, Cape Breton, September 26th. One 
division of the party, with Prof. George H. Barton, was landed 
for a considerable stay near Disco island ; another, with Prof . 
Alfred Burton, at the Umanak fjord; and a third division, 
with Prof. Ralph S. Tarr. on the shore of Melville bay. 
In Science for October 9th (pages 520-523), Prof. Tarr 
gives a brief narrative of the voyage, and notes of portions of 
his observations on Big island in Hudson strait, on the ad- 
joining southern part of Battin land, on the Nugsuak penin- 
sula, and in the vicinity of the Devil's Thumb, Melville bay. 
He found evidences of the former extension of the Greenland 
ice-sheet beyond the extremity of the Nugsuak, to the Duck 
islands, eight to ten miles out to sea, where it had a thick- 
ness of not less than 800 feet at a distance of thirty-two miles 
from the limits of the present glaciation. In the retreat of 
the ice-sheet, which is now taking place, the glacial currents 
on the margin, under the influence of the minor topographic 
features, are in some places turned much aside or even quite 
opposite from the courses which they had during the farther 
extension of the ice. 
It was found impossible to remove and bring the large mass 
of iron, thought to be a meteorite, to which Peary had been 
guided by the Eskimos in May, 1894, situated about twenty- 
five miles southeast of cape York. It is to be hoped that a 
geologic description of its locality may have been taken with 
sufficient fullness to determine whether that iron mass, and 
others a few miles farther eastward, may be of terrestrial 
origin, like the iron in ecpially large masses occurring farther 
south, atOvifak, in basalt, and also weathered out from it, 
where they were long supi)osed to be fragments of a great 
meteorite. w. u. 
