Nordenskiöld was born at Helsingfors, the capital of Finland, on Nov. 18, 1832. His father was a well-known naturalist, and the head of the mining department of Finland, and it was to his early training that the son owed his first instruction in that particular branch of science of which he was destined to become one of the leading lights. Honours crowded thickly upon him, and he was already becoming one of the most noted mineralogists in Sweden when, at the age of twenty-six, he joined Professor Torrell’s expedition to Spitzbergen. Neither with this expedition nor with that of 1861, in which he served under the same leader, need we concern ourselves. In 1864, however, that is to say, in the year after Spitzbergen had been circumnavigated for the first time by the Norwegian Carlsen, the illness of Professor Chydenius, who was to have acted as leader of the Swedish expedition of that year, left the command of the expedition open. It was offered to Nordenskiöld, who, of course, accepted it. This party was sent out with a view not only to pursuing scientific researches in Spitzbergen, but also to exploring the unknown regions to the north of that island. The first part of his task Nordenskiöld fulfilled admirably, among other things rediscovering Wiche Land, which had not been sighted since Thomas Edge chanced upon it in 1617; he was only prevented from fulfilling the second by the fact that he fell in with seven boatloads of shipwrecked walrus hunters to whom, of course, he had to give succour. This placed so severe a strain upon his commissariat department that he was obliged to desist from his original intention. To Nordenskiöld’s deep regret, the Swedish Government now came to the conclusion that it had done enough in the way of Arctic research for the present. The explorer, however, had acquired a taste for Arctic travel, and he was by no means inclined to give in without a murmur. Accordingly, he approached Count Ehrensvärd, the Governor of Gothenburg, upon the subject, and through his kind offices a fund was raised by such mercantile princes as Dickson, Ekman and Carnegie, with the result that, in 1868, he was able to depart upon an expedition during the course of which he succeeded in attaining to a higher point than ever explorer in the old world had reached in a ship.