But from first to last the history of polar exploration is a single mighty manifestation of the power of the unknown over the mind of man, perhaps greater and more evident here than in any other phase of human life. Nowhere else have we won our way more slowly, nowhere else has every new step cost so much trouble, so many privations and sufferings, and certainly nowhere have the resulting discoveries promised fewer material advantages--and nevertheless, new forces have always been found ready to carry the attack farther, to stretch once more the limits of the world. But if it has cost a struggle, it is not without its joys. Who can describe his emotion when the last difficult ice-floe has been passed, and the sea lies open before him, leading to new realms? Or when the mist clears and mountain-summits shoot up, one behind another farther and farther away, on which the eye of man has never rested, and in the farthest distance peaks appear on the sea-horizon--on the sky above them a yellowish white reflection of the snow-fields--where the imagination pictures new continents?... Ever since the Norsemen's earliest voyages arctic expeditions have certainly brought material advantages to the human race, such as rich fisheries, whaling and sealing, and so on; they have produced scientific results in the knowledge of hitherto unknown regions and conditions; but they have given us far more than this: they have tempered the human will for the conquest of difficulties; they have furnished a school of manliness and self-conquest in the midst of the slackness of varying ages, and have held up noble ideals before the rising generation; they have fed the imagination, have given fairy-tales to the child, and raised the thoughts of its elders above their daily toil. Take arctic travel out of our history, and will it not be poorer? Perhaps we have here the greatest service it has done humanity. We speak of the first discovery of the North--but how do we know when the first man arrived in the northern regions of the earth? We know nothing but the very last steps in the migrations of humanity. What a stretch of time there must have been between the period of the Neanderthal man in Europe and the first Pelasgians, or Iberians, or Celts, that we find there in the neolithic age, in the earliest dawn of history. How infinitesimal in comparison with this the whole of the recent period which we call history becomes.