Henry Hudson had in his day established a farthest North record of about the eighty-second parallel of latitude--leaving only about five hundred miles to be traversed. But three centuries were required in which to compass this relatively small gap. Expedition after expedition penetrated as far as human endurance under given conditions could carry it. Some of the explorers returned with vivid tales of the rigors of the arctic climate; others fell victim to conditions that they could not overcome. But the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries passed and left the "Boreal Center" undiscovered. Toward the close of the nineteenth century the efforts of explorers seemed to be redoubled and one famous expedition after another established new records of "farthest North." The names of Nansen, the Duke of the Abruzzi, and Peary, became familiar to a generation whose imagination seemed curiously in sympathy with that lure of the North which determined the life activities of so many would-be discoverers. So when in the early Autumn of 1909 it was suddenly announced that two explorers in succession had at last, in the picturesque phrasing of one of them, "penetrated the Boreal Center and plucked the polar prize," the popular mind was stirred as it has seldom been by any other event not having either a directly personal or an international political significance. The two men whose claims to have discovered the pole were thus announced in such spectacular fashion, were Dr. Frederick A. Cook, of Brooklyn, and Lieutenant Commander Robert E. Peary, of the United States Navy. Dr. Cook claimed to have reached the pole, accompanied only by two Eskimo companions, on the twenty-first day of April, 1908. Commander Peary reported that he had reached the pole, accompanied by Mr. Matthew H. Henson and four Eskimos, on the seventh day of April, 1909. The controversy that ensued regarding the authenticity of these alleged discoveries is not likely to be forgotten by any reader of our generation. Its merits and demerits have no particular concern for the purely scientific inquirer. At best, as Professor Pickering of Harvard is reported to have said, "the quest of the pole is a good sporting event" rather than an enterprise of great scientific significance. It suffices for our present purpose, therefore, to know that Dr. Cook's records, as adjudged by the tribunal of the University of Copenhagen, to which they were sent, were pronounced inadequate to demonstrate the validity of his claim; whereas Peary and Henson were adjudged by the American Geographical Society, after inspection of the records, to have accomplished what was claimed for them. What has greater interest from the present standpoint is the question, which the controversy brought actively to the minds of the unscientific public, as to how tests are made which determine, in the mind of the explorer himself, the fact of his arrival at the pole.