the serious side of the argument of the celebrated geographer of Gotha, for some of these whalemen, to be more sure of having reached the pole, pretended also that they had gone some degrees beyond it. assertion, he cites the legend of some Dutch | the North Cape of Cook, to enter among whalemen who pretended to have navigated the floating ice, to penetrate into the Polythis sea. This is not, it must be confessed, nia or free sea, and thence to sail towards the pole. The considerations on which this project is based are of two kinds. First, a series of facts ascertained by observation or deduced from theory inclines us to believe that the mean temperature, instead of falling in a continuous manner to the pole, is, on the contrary, higher there than beneath the polar circle, that is to say, at about 67° latitude. There would result from this the possibility of meeting a free sea at the pole even, surrounded by a barrier of ice which closes completely only during the coldest months of winter. In the second place, the attentive examination of the polar currents and the ice which they drift has just confirmed in a striking manner this hypothesis of a vast open sea rolling its waves round the boreal pole. The accounts of Hedenstroem, Wrangel, Anjou, who have seen an immense sheet of free water to the north of Siberia, the reports of Morton and of Dr. Hayes, who have met with an open sea to the north of Smith's Strait, acquire therefore a meaning thoroughly clear and precise, which hardly permits us to preserve a doubt on the reality of a polar sea. Thanks to the incessant efforts of Doctor Petermann, the German expedition left Bergen in Norway in the month of May last, under the command of Captain Ch. Koldewey. The lieutenant's name is Hildebrandt; a pilot and thirteen Bremen sailors compose the rest of the crew. The vessel, which bears the name of Germania, is only 80 tons burthen. It is quite new, and has been bought and equipped at Bergen. This modest expedition, but animated with a strong will, will first try to reach the eastern coast of Greenland, above 74° latitude, touch at Sabine Island, and then follow the coast to enter the polar sea, and leave it, if possible, by Behring's Straits, which separate America from Siberia. If the expedition cannot penetrate beyond Spitzbergen, it will undertake explorations in Gillis's Land, situated further east: the Germania carries provisions for a year. At the end of July, news has been received of this expedition; the ship was entangled in a field of icebergs and completely arrested in its progress, as might have been expected. A little while since, a Swedish expedition has also set out in search of the pole, following the route Parry indicated in 1827. Would it not be time to make a last effort to permit the French expedition to hasten its departure? We are going to set forth the chances of success which the French project seems to offer, and to explain the reasons which justify the choice of the route by which M. Gustave Lambert proposes to try the access to the boreal pole. M. Lambert, hydrographer and navigator, an old pupil of the Ecole Polytechnique, has already visited the places where he wishes to conduct the expedition he is preparing. Leaving Havre on board of a ship equipped for the whale fishery the 12th June, 1865, he passed Behring's Straits to advance to the 72nd degree of north latitude, and during three months, in the midst of icebergs, he has been able to study on the spot the formidable problem which he desires to-day to face. M. Gustave Lambert has fixed his choice on a way of which only one trial has yet been made, that of Cook. In the month of July, that is to say at the great breaking up of ice in the polar regions, crossing Behring's Straits, he would double on the west Cape Serdze and It is known since a long time that the temperature of a place is not regulated by the position merely which it occupies between the equator and the pole; this is proved by the isothermal lines which Alexander von Humboldt has taught us to trace on the maps of the globe. It results that the poles or points at which terminates the axis of rotation of the earth are not necessarily the coldest points. In 1821, Sir David Brewster concluded from the direction of the isothermal lines that there existed two poles of cold, situated the one in Siberia, the other in North America; the mean temperature will, therefore, be sensibly higher at the pole properly so called than in some points of the polar circle. In 1864, an illustrious Italian geometer, Plana, submitted to calculation the distribution of the solar heat on the surface of the earth, and demonstrated that starting from the polar circle the mean temperature will increase up to the pole, a result which it was difficult to foresee theoretically, although it is in accordance with the testimony of observations. More recently, M. Gustave Lambert has arrived himself at an analogous conclusion in investigating the laws by which insolation, or the quantity of heat furnished by the sun, will vary from one place to another at different epochs of the year. The quantity of heat which a point of the earth receives at a given moment depends on the obliquity of the rays; it increases in proportion as the sun rises; but when we would appreciate the effect which the sun can produce during a period more or less long, it is not enough to consider the direction of the rays: the relative length of the days and nights must be taken into account. The nocturnal radiation makes the earth lose a considerable portion of the caloric which it has absorbed during the day, and it results that the length of the nights can counterbalance up to a certain point the effects of very hot days. Now at the pole the sun, during six months, does not set; the heat which it emits accumulates and concentrates incessantly during the long day of more than a hundred and eighty common days. It may be conceived then that towards the middle of summer the polar temperature can reach a degree more than sufficient to produce the fusion more or less complete of the ice formed during the long night of winter. M. Gustave Lambert has succeeded in constructing a curve representing the power of insolation for the different places of the earth and the different days of the year. In examining the direction and the inflections of this curve. he has ascertained that at the moment of the solstice (21st June) the North Pole will receive in twenty-four hours a quantity of heat greater by onefifth than that which a point situated under the tropic of Cancer receives at the same moment. In this calculation, no account is made of the atmospheric absorption, of which the influence is much stronger at the pole, where the sun is very low, than under the tropic, where it rises very high at the hour of noon; the loss which the rays suffer in crossing the inferior beds of the atmosphere modifies necessarily the result which is arrived at in considering simply the position of the sun from its relation to the polar horizon. We may nevertheless affirm that the summer heat is much more considerable at the pole than is commonly admitted, and in any case that it is more than sufficient to explain the melting of the ice above the 84th or 85th parallel of latitude. The existence of an open sea at the boreal pole is rendered still probable by the consideration of the currents which navigators meet in those parts. The polar currents are very numerous. From the west coast of Greenland, a first current directs itself to the south-east and accumulates the ice in the straits of Banks, of McClintock, and of Queen Victoria. The direction of this considerable mass of water is moreover proved in an unanswerable manner by the transportation of the ship Resolute, which was found in Davis's Strait in 1865, when Kellett had abandoned her in May 1854, a thousand miles from that point, in the north, near Cape Cockburn. In Behring's Straits, a very strong current, which flows along the coasts of Asia, seems to present a semi-annual character; it goes by turns from the south to the north and from the north to the south. The third current descends from the north to the south between Spitzbergen and Nova-Zembla; the force of impulsion of these waters is such that they sometimes break the ice-floe, which facilitates the navigation of these parts. The vast space of sea comprised between the west coast of Spitzbergen and Greenland gives also passage to a current which breaks up the ice, while preventing it however from melting. It is this current which in 1827 carried away the floe under Parry's feet, and did not permit him, in spite of superhuman efforts, to go beyond 82° latitude. All these polar streams seem to proceed directly from a vast reservoir, from a sea surrounding the boreal pole. In the austral regions, the currents seem on the contrary to affect circular directions and to flow around the icebergs, which gives rise to the supposition that a continent exists at the South Pole. Other proofs in favour of this hypothesis can be drawn from the study of the masses of ice which are met with at the two poles. At the south are observed all the phenomena which characterize glaciers properly so called, or masses of ice raised on a fixed base, earth or rock. There renews itself every year in gigantic proportions the labor which geologists have observed in the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Cordilleras of the Andes. When the colds of winter arrive, the watery vapor with which the air has been saturated by the powerful evaporations of summer condenses into thick snow, and falls in large flakes to accumulate during all the gloomy season of the six months of night. At the first fires of spring, when the sun begins to diffuse its heat over these terrible countries, the ice begins to melt. The water flows then between the fissures of the ice and in the interstices of the rocks, where it congeals again, increasing in volume and repelling with incredible force the obstacles which inconvenience it. It is not at a few points that this labor takes place, it is in every sense and on all parts of the glacier, to which during summer this internal labor gives a sort of life and irresistible movement of progression. At the approach of winter, when-the first signs of twilight show themselves, the power of impulsion is subdued by the cold, and diminishes by degrees to lose itself in the long sleep of winter. This life of the glaciers is one of the most dangerous obstacles for those navigators who approach the South Pole. When the season has been warm, and the breaking up has made itself strongly felt, the glacier hurls into the sea enormous blocks mixed with rocks and vegetable detritus. The icebergs play a great part in the recitals of the explorers of the antarctic pole; at every moment their ships are threatened by floating mountains, or by detached blocks of formidable walls of ice, which seem as if they would bar their passage. If the configuration of the floe of the South Pole, of which the immense glaciers must have been laid on fixed foundations in the most distant periods of the glacial age, forces us thus to admit a continent, the study of the physical nature of these masses of ice demonstrates also their terrestrial origin. In the water they appear black, while in the light they are transparent and of an azure color. Very different phenomena characterize the regions of the North Pole. There one meets rather ice of marine formation, the ice of the ice-fields. The snow which falls into the sea forms at first a sort of thick yeast; if the weather is calm it congeals, and the water is covered with a thin sheet of ice, partly clear and partly flecked or agglutinated snow. "As soon as the wind rises," says M. Gustave Lambert, “ everything breaks up, crumbles, and presents one of the most wonderful spectacles that can be seen. Every little morsel of ice in melting surrounds itself with a regular footbath of soft water which does not mix with the sea-water; the rays of the sun, which is very low, give to all these pools of water the colors of the rainbow, reproducing on an enormous scale the phenomenon of the colored rings of Newton, and reflecting all the shades of the spectrum, but so pale that the charm vanishes to give place to a painful and lugubrious impression; it seems for an instant that nature sees itself in full as through a sort of winding-sheet or shroud of gauze. These are the embryos of icebergs." This ice is opaque and of a milky white; there are never found in it debris of rocks or vegetable detritus, as in that of the South Pole. The fields of marine ice, which are rare at the austral pole and common at the boreal pole, permit us again to affirm the existence of a continent at the South, of a free sea at the North. The testimony of navigators who have perceived from a distance this polar sea can At lastly be invoked. The expeditions which 66 What seems to result from all these facts is that there exists a polar sea free from ice. What seems equally certain is, that an expedition in sledges, as Mr. Sherard Osborn has proposed, would offer no serious prospect of success. There remains then only to discuss the choice of the route by which a ship might hope to arrive at the pole with the least danger. If at first we throw our eyes on the labyrinth of islands, canals and bays which stretches to the north-west of Baffin's Bay, the nearness of the fields and mountains of ice which get loose from it, would render this route excessively dangerous. "Any ship dragged to the north and the east of Parry's Islands into the polar basin is necessarily ground to pieces," says McClure. Scoresby is of the same opinion, and the fate of so many ships which have disappeared in these terrible places should remove any hope of venturing into them with a polar expedition. Fly from the land!" such should be the motto of the expedition. Parry's idea of opening a way for himself through the floe which extends from Greenland to Spitzbergen will appear equally chimerical, if one recalls the numerous attempts which have been made without any success in this direction. What hope can one have of piercing a barrier of ice 250 miles broad, where terrible tempests reign unceasingly? The same objections hold against the way chosen by the German expedition, which is going to try to ap proach the pole between Spitzbergen and Nova-Zembla, where Willoughby, Wood, Barentz, Hudson, and Sutke have broken their energy against one of the strongest points of the polar cuirass. In spite of the power of the gulf-stream, so much invoked by Mr. Petermann, this floe has only been slightly dissolved, and even during summer the masses of ice pile themselves on it at a depth which has not yet been determined. | that it was inhabited, which would accord Moreover, if it is true that some vessels with the traditions preserved among the nahave formerly ventured beyond the 82d de- tives of the Siberian coast. "The route gree, it is only to the hazard of an excep- which I should recommend," says Captain tional breaking up that this success must be Long in a letter published by the Moniteur attributed, for these coasts of Nova-Zem- Commercial of Honolulu of the 18th of bla, into which in 1839 the Recherche pene- January last, "would be the following. trated pretty far, had been, so M. Charles The Asiatic coast should be followed from Martins tells us, inaccessible during several Behring's Straits to Cape Recouanaï or summers. Consequently, so long as the Cape Chelagskoï. It is towards the coast great States do not have men and more es- that the ice first melts, and the numerous pecially ships to sacrifice to the dangerous currents of water produced by the melting and continual endeavor to make a breach of the snow drive the ice to the north, in in these thick floes, it is not by a route ex- such a manner as to form along the land a ceptionally free that one should try to reach free passage which a vessel can traverse the North Pole, but by a road which is only very easily, especially if it is aided by rarely encumbered. steam. Beyond Cape Yakan the ice directs itself from the land towards the north, and is carried by these currents, which disperse in Wrangel's free sea in fragments sufficiently apart from one another to permit a ship to circulate in it without danger. From a certain point between Capes Recouanaï and Chelagskoï, the direction to follow would be that from the north to the north-west, as the ice would permit, to the north of the islands of Laakhow, where one would begin to undergo the effects of the currents which proceed from the rivers of Northern Asia. Thence it would be necessary to go straight to the pole or the islands of Spitzbergen, according to circumstances. That the passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic will be accomplished by one of the routes indicated above, I believe as firmly as one can believe in an event to come. For this reason, the choice of Behring's Straits imposes itself as a necessity. One cannot invoke against this route either anterior checks or the innumerable difficulties which the other ways present at the first view. We have neither icebergs here, nor dangerous currents. The voyage of Wrangel proves that in many points the floe is, so to speak, only a thin screen, scarcely separating during some months the free waves of the Polynia from the waters of Behring's Sea, frequented every year by numerous whalers. Resting on these indications of Wrangel, and after having made himself a reconnoitring campaign into these parts, M. Gustave Lambert has fixed his choice on the route which is to conduct him to the pole. After having crossed Behring's Straits at the earliest in July, he takes a westerly direction, passes beyond Cape Serdze, then the North Cape of Cook, the extreme point reached by that navigator. He then finds himself in the midst of the movable debris of the floe, between which the ship is steered, the more extended barriers being blown up with powder or cut with saws; he penetrates into the free sea, crosses in his vessel the points where Wrangel's sledge was stopped by pools of water separating fragments of thin and flat ice, and at length reaches the North Pole. A letter of Captain Long's, addressed from Honolulu to the President of the Geographical Society of France under date of June 15, 1868, confirms the preceding details, and contains very exact indications on the state of the sea to the north of Siberia. "Last season," he says, "has been very favorable to polar explorations; the sea near the coast, going from Behring's Straits towards the east, was free from ice. When we were 40 miles to the north of The choice of Behring's Straits has, more- Cape Chelagskoï, not a vestige of ice was over, just been justified in a manner as strik-perceived from the top of the masts in the ing as unexpected. In the month of August, directions comprised between the north and 1867, Captain Long, an American, com- the west. The weather was clear and beaumanding the whaler Nile, entered the Polar Sea, and was able, without meeting any serious obstacles, to approach to within ten miles of the point where Wrangel had perceived a sheet of free water in the month of March, 1823. On his return, he discovered, at about 70 miles to the north of Cape Yakan, a vast land covered with verdure, on which walruses and seals were playing. The aspect of this land seemed to indicate tiful, the sky in that direction was of a dark watery appearance. The absence of whales in those parts rendered the continuation of the voyage little profitable; I returned then towards the east, and I passed at less than ten miles this side of the point where Wrangel had seen the free sea in the month of March. To the north of this position, there were some sheets of ice at considerable intervals, and I believe that a ship could have advanced very far without meeting any obstacle. With a well-equipped vessel I would not have hesitated to attempt the passage through the Polar Sea to Spitzbergen; but with my barque, which was not prepared for the pressure of the ice, and with provisions for four months only, it would have been folly." Captain Long insists afterwards on the well-ascertained fact that the winds of the north and the north-west bring to Cape North fogs and an elevation of temperature which seem to indicate the presence of a free sea in the direction of the north.—Such is the last phase of the question and the summary of what is known to-day of the mysterious regions which surround the boreal pole. Everything gives us reason to hope that in a little while a fortunate and hardy ship will trace its furrow in this unexplored sea, will reconnoitre these lands, inhabited, perhaps, and of which we did not even know the existence yesterday, will affirm at length at the extremities of the world the power and the energy of man. Theoretical science expects great results from the observations which can be made at the pole, and when theory advances, practice always feels the effects. Will not moreover the expedition which will make us acquainted with the last point of our domain, until now withdrawn from our investigations, mark an important date in the history of humanity? all classes and of opposite tendencies was nigh at hand. The Dean of Cork avoided both of these mistakes. His copious Irish eloquence, and a powerful voice, might easily have tempted him to indulge in impassioned rhetoric, but this temptation was severely resisted, and, with one or two momentary exceptions, the sermon was a fine example of logical precision in the use of language, even though it was delivered without written notes. His theme was, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." There was a sense, he said, in which these words might serve as the motto for all true teachers in all ages of the world. The final cause and aim of all science and all philosophy is the enrichment of human life, the making of the life of humanity in some way or other a nobler, a cleaner, a fairer thing than it was before. And as that great Association moved about from city to city, investigating the conditions, the resources, and the philosophy of existence, and bringing to light such truth as was attainable in relation to the world in which men lived, it might, with greater significance and without the least irreverence, adopt for itself the language of the Founder of the Christian religion, and say, "We are come among you that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." In discussing the sense in which these words had been first used, he observed that the Christian religion differed from all other ancient faiths in the profession which it made to impart a new and divine life to man. Christ did not come to be the teacher and helper of man's life only. He claimed to be the author and ONE of the most noteworthy incidents in the giver of it. He does not merely say the brilliant and busy week just spent by that He is the discoverer of that life or the the savans at Norwich was the delivery of teacher of its laws, but He says, "I am a sermon on Sunday in the cathedral by that life. I am essential to it. It cannot Dr. Magee. Such an occasion seldom oc- be without Me." The writings of His folcurs in a preacher's life, for in the vast lowers, and notably of Paul, are filled and congregation which filled every cranny of saturated with this idea of a Christ whose the building, there were the President and life is in them, who lives in them. No principal officers of the Association, be- Jew ever said that he lived in Moses, no sides conspicuous representatives of all Mussulman that the life of Mohammed was those forms of modern thought and inquiry imparted to him or reproduced in him. It on which Christian preachers too often is the distinctive mark of Christianity that look with jealousy if not with avowed hos- it alone professes to give the life of its tility. It was an occasion on which weak Founder to men: that it is not merely a men of one school would have vented creed, or a system of doctrine, or a code of vague denunciations of the aggressive and laws, or a scheme of philosophy; but a sceptical spirit of modern science; while new vital force in the world—a life having still weaker men of another type would its own phenomena, its own conditions of have flattered their hearers by making light existence, its own laws of manifestation, a of the conflict between science and religion, or by expressing a dim belief that a reconciliation between "truth-seekers" of From The Spectator. THE DEAN OF CORK AT THE BRITISH AS SOCIATION. life as real as any of those forms of life which science arranges and classifies, a life which it was said had been supernaturally |