Mr. Marten has affirmed, that the sun here, at midnight, appears with all the faintness of the moon; but his assertion has not been corroborated by the experience of subsequent voyagers. During my stay in this country, in 1806 and 1807, distinction between day and night was almost completely lost. Any perceptible difference between the splendour and radiance of the mid-day and mid-night sun, in clear weather, (if these expressions may be used,) arose only from a different degree of altitude. Some of our most experienced Greenland sailors, when called upon deck, have frequently asked me whether it was day or night; and I have often seen them obliged, even in clear sun-shine, to consult the quadrant on this head. I may add, that Captain Phipps has also contradicted Mr. Marten in the most positive manner. The temperature here is extremely fluctuating. Sometimes the heat is so great as to melt the pitch on the decks and cordage of the vessels, and in a few minutes after, succeed high winds, snow, and frost. The sky, even in calm and serene weather, is covered with dense white clouds, the repositories of the snow so often falling. The degree of heat experienced in these northern latitudes being so much greater than is experienced in the same latitudes in the southern hemisphere, is supposed to proceed from the greater quantity of land in the north reflecting the rays of the sun, which in the south are absorbed by the ocean. Whatever hypothesis may be adduced to account for the greater temperature of the north, the fact itself is indisputable. Terra del Fuego, situated only in fifty-five degrees south latitude, is extremely cold; and Captain Cook could not penetrate farther than the seventy-first degree of latitude, a distance far short of what the Greenland ships are every year in the habit of sailing towards the other Pole. Thunder and lightning are unknown at Spitzbergen, or at least are extremely rare. Forster supposes that the electric exhalations in a country so much covered with snow must be very few, and these so much consumed by the frequency of the _Aurora Borealis_, that there is never collected at one time a quantity of fluid sufficient to produce thunder and lightning. That luminous appearance, so often observed during a storm in this country, he alleges to be the effect of volcanic eruptions; though this, I confess, seems to me extremely problematical. Vid. Forster’s _Hist. Voyages_, p. 486. There is a great diversity among the accounts given by different travellers, of the forms assumed by the new fallen snow in this country. During hard frost, I always observed that the flakes closely resembled an asterisk with six points. As the temperature varied, their appearance was changed, which may, perhaps, serve to explain the differences alluded to.