whose fossils could give us any information as to the geological age of this country. According to what I here found at Cape Flora, it appeared as if a great part at least of this basalt dated from the Jurassic period, as it lay immediately above, and was partly intermixed with, strata of this age. Moreover, on the top of the basalt, as will presently appear, vegetable fossils were found dating from the later part of the Jurassic period. It thus seems as though Franz Josef Land were of a comparatively old formation. All these horizontal strata of basalt, stretching over all the islands at about the same height, seem to indicate that there was once a continuous mass of land here, which in the course of time, being exposed to various disintegrating forces, such as frost, damp, snow, glaciers, and the sea, has been split up and worn away, and has in part disappeared under the sea, so that now only scattered islands and rocks remain, separated from each other by fjords and sounds. As these formations bear a certain resemblance to what has been found in several places in Spitzbergen and Northeast Land, we may plausibly assume that these two groups of islands originally belonged to the same mass of land. It would therefore be interesting to investigate the as yet unknown region which separates them, the region which we should have had to traverse had we not fallen in with Jackson and his expedition. There is doubtless much that is new, and especially many new islands, to be found in this strait--possibly a continuous series of islands, so that there may be some difficulty in determining where the one archipelago ends and the other begins. The investigation of this region is a problem of no small scientific importance, which we may hope that the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition will succeed in solving. How far the Franz Josef Land archipelago stretches towards the north cannot as yet be determined with certainty. According to our experience, indeed, it would seem improbable that there is land of any great extent in that direction. It is true that Payer, when he was upon Crown Prince Rudolf's Land, saw Petermann's Land and Oscar's Land, the first to the north and the second to the west; but that Petermann's Land, at any rate, cannot be of any size seems to be proved by our observations, since we saw no land at all as we came southward a good way east of it, and the ice seemed to drift to the westward practically unimpeded when we were in its latitude. That King Oscar's Land also cannot be of any great extent seems to me evident from what we saw in the course of the winter and spring, as the wind swept the ice unhindered away from the land, so that there can scarcely be any extensive and continuous mass of land to the north or northwest to keep it back.