OBITUARY NOTICES. 
EMIL BESSELS. 
Emil Bessels was born in Heidelberg, June 2, 1847. 
Educated at the University, and securing the degree of 
Doctor in Medicine, he was more disposed toward science 
and belles-lettres than to the practice of his profession. 
Being in easy circumstances, he was enabled to follow his 
natural bent, and for a time was a student in zoology under 
Van Beneden, and an assistant of Krauss at the Naturalien 
Cabinet or Royal Museum of Wiirtemberg, in Stuttgart. 
He became interested in Arctic discovery, and his first essay 
in that direction, under the encouragement of Petermann of 
Gotha, was the well-known voyage of 1869 into the sea be¬ 
tween Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla. By his observations 
on this journey he traced the influence of the Gulf Stream 
water east of Spitzbergen, and added much to the scanty 
knowledge of this region then available. In 1870 he was 
called to the field as military surgeon, rendering service in 
the hospitals which brought him a public commendation 
from the Grand Duke of Baden. In 1871 he came to 
America, at Petermann’s suggestion, to join Hall’s polar ex¬ 
pedition as naturalist and surgeon. Most of the scientific 
results of this voyage were the fruit of his personal efforts. 
After the rescue of the survivors he returned to America, 
where for some years he was busy at the Smithsonian Insti¬ 
tution in preparing for publication the scientific results of 
the voyage, one of the most striking of which was the proof, 
first brought out by him, of the insularity of Greenland, 
which he deduced from the tidal observations secured on the 
expedition. In 1876 his work was printed in quarto, under 
the title of “ Report on the Scientific Results of the Polaris 
60—Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 11. (465) 
