1. The weather during the last days of April was truly delightful; calms and bright sunshine made work and exercise in the open air exceedingly pleasant, and the temperature never fell below -2° F. But even this amount of cold was sufficient to retard the softening of the snow for some days, and favoured the carrying out of a third sledge expedition. Its intention was the exploration of the western portions of Franz-Josef Land; for the question of its extension towards Spitzbergen was scarcely less interesting than its extension towards the North. I should have liked to devote weeks to the undertaking, but our impending return left a few days only at my disposal. 2. On the 29th of April (the thermometer marking -2° F.) Lieutenant Brosch, Haller, and myself left the ship. Jubinal and Torossy were selected to drag the small sledge, which was equipped for a week’s expedition; Pekel accompanied us as a volunteer. The measurement of the angles necessary to complete my survey detained us so long on the heights of Wilczek Island, that we could not make our start on the level ice till the next morning. The power of the sun some days was so great, that the temperature of the tent at noon, when there was no wind, rose to 63° F., while in the two preceding months it was from 10° F. to -13° F. If the temperature during the day did not fall more than 6° below freezing-point, we required no clothes beyond our woollen underclothing and stockings. As we started in the morning of April 30, some snow fell, and the mountains were covered with masses of mist, which lay in horizontal layers half way up their sides. Cape Brünn, however, which was our goal, lay before us, clear and distinct, and the long glacier walls, running to the west of it round the edge of MacClintock Island, were under the constant play of refraction, and could be traced as far as Cape Oppolzer, from which point they seemed to trend to the north-west. 3. The snow-track of the Sound was still firm, so that our dogs needed little help in dragging our baggage, especially after we had buried provision for the return journey in an iceberg. We had scarcely finished this labour when we discovered a bear’s hole in the layer of snow at its base, and immediately afterwards we beheld its occupant coming furiously towards us. Several hasty shots were fired at him, but the bear escaped, though evidently wounded. The nearer we approached MacClintock Island, the more frequently we found fissures in the ice running parallel to the coast and communicating with a small “ice-hole” in the south about four miles off. Trusting, however, that during the next few days these fissures would not open so much as to prevent our re-crossing them, we went on and pitched our encampment near the terminal front of one of the glaciers of the island.