12. If the earlier Polar expeditions pursued exclusively material ends, a decided change appears in those of the present century—the Polar world itself became an object of scientific investigation. With Sir John Ross (1818) began a series of expeditions, at first subservient to the idea of a North-West passage, but which ultimately derived all their importance from their attempt—ineffectual as it proved—to rescue the lives of 139 men, who had fallen far from the fields and scenes where earthly fame is commonly achieved. It was these expeditions, still fresh in the memory of this generation, which, summoning to their aid the modern power of steam against the ice, succeeded in drawing on our Arctic maps a circle whose mean distance was 200 (German) miles from the Pole. Parry on the frozen sea of Spitzbergen had approached it within 100 miles (German); Kane, Hayes and Hall on the coast of the Kennedy Channel, the former to within 116, and the two latter to within 108 miles, and the Austro-Hungarian expedition to within 109 miles. 13. M’Clintock, who returned with the relics of the Franklin expedition, succeeded in perfecting a mode of discovery independent of the ship—that by means of sledging—admirably adapted for future Arctic expeditions. But the North-West passage for which six generations had toiled, though discovered, was shown to be utterly worthless for all material purposes—a dreary web of coast lines. CHAPTER IV. THE INNER POLAR SEA. 1. The Arctic Sea, in some of its features, forcibly impresses us with its resemblance to the glaciers of the Alps. In both cases, the ice presses from a region, colder and less favoured by climate, towards one warmer and more favoured. In the Alpine glaciers, the movement is from above downwards; in the Frozen Ocean, the movement is from a higher to a lower geographical latitude. In both cases, the tongues and spurs of the masses of ice formed by the configuration of the land or by currents of the sea, terminate, whenever they reach an isothermal curve of altitude or latitude, the mean temperature of which suffices to dissolve them or prevent their formation. Moraines also have their equivalent in the Arctic Sea; for it is an established fact that icebergs and ice-fields laden with the _débris_ and rubbish of Arctic lands, deposit these burdens round the outer edge of the Frozen Ocean, and to this process, partially at least, the origin of the Newfoundland Banks is ascribed. If this comparison between the phenomena of high latitudes and great altitudes be just, then we should have as much reason to believe in the existence of the so-called open Polar Sea, as we should have to maintain, that in our glacier ranges ice ceases to be formed above a certain altitude.