Doctor William S. Bruce, indeed, tells us in his “Polar Exploration” that, generally speaking, germ diseases are unknown in the Arctic, the intense cold making everywhere—in the air, on the sea and on the land—for a high degree of bacterial sterility. “Under ordinary conditions it is not possible to ‘catch cold’ in the polar regions .... infectious fevers are practically unknown, unless contracted in a dirty ship or filthily kept house.” Hence the feasibility of a practical asepsis in accident or operation. Bishop Bompass once amputated a man’s leg above the knee, and the operation was completely successful. The Bishop had no medical knowledge beyond having attended some lectures at an opthalmic hospital, in order to learn how to treat his Indians for snow-blindness. The whaling voyage itself might be uneventful enough until a high latitude was reached; but after that, the greatest possible skill was required to navigate the ship safely through the “pack” ice coming down from the Pole through Davis Straits and Fox Channel, on its way to the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland, to be finally melted and dispersed in the Gulf Stream. Arctic navigators and oceanographers enumerate many varieties and vagaries of the polar ice. Suffice it here to note that “pack ice” is the jammed and frozen conglomeration of masses of ice from broken floes and vast disintegrating “fields” of ice. In Straits, this pack is always heaviest in the centre but less compact along the shores, so that a vessel can sometimes be worked along the coast when navigation in the middle would be impossible. This “middle pack” is rightly dreaded by Arctic seamen. A change of wind might drift it in upon the shore, when the ship’s destruction would be inevitable. The great danger in meeting the ice pack out at sea consists in the fact that the larger part of the floe is almost submerged and little of it is to be seen. Again, it bristles with spurs and points which stick up and out like spears and rams, any one of which might rip up a hull sailing at any speed.