free from ice, but in 1852, Belcher, although he penetrated far further than Penny, was confronted in the same channel by pack- and drift-ice. Scoresby the younger, to whose profound faculty of observation we owe the most significant hints on the nature of the Polar Sea, although he had navigated the Greenland ice-ocean for twenty years, landed only once on its coast. The Swedish expedition (1861) could approach the north-east of Spitzbergen only in boats; Smith sailed over the sea there (1871) as far as Cape Smith. The walrus-hunter, Matilas, sailed round (1864) the north-east island completely, and Carlsen, an ice navigator, as successful as he was skilful, in 1863 circumnavigated Spitzbergen, and in 1871 Novaya Zemlya, and discovered there the relics of Barentz’s winter quarters. In 1872, King Karl Land was circumnavigated, although both Koldewey and Nordenskjöld (1868) as well as the first Austrian expedition (1871) had in vain attempted to approach it. How greatly also, in the same year, the state of the ice varies in different places, is proved by the fact, that Franklin learnt from the whalers that they never saw the ice so thick and so strong in Davis Straits as at the end of July 1819, while Parry, more to the north by some degrees of latitude, pursued his path of discovery even to Melville Island, and in the following year returned to England without meeting any special obstacles. These examples, to which many more might be added, show how variable are the chances of ice-navigation from one year to another. But however variable the conditions of the ice may be, the impediments, even under the most favourable circumstances, are so very great, that we have never been able to penetrate the innermost Polar regions,—_penetrate_, that is, _to where, according to the views of an earlier time, the open Polar Sea should be found_. 8. Those propitious ice-years amount therefore to nothing more than a greater recession of the outer ice-barrier—trifling when compared with the mighty whole—or to an increased navigability of certain coast-waters, or to a local loosening of the inner Polar ice-net. In reality the whole Arctic Sea, with its countless ice-fields and floes, and its web of fine interlacing water-ways, is nothing but a net constantly in motion from local, terrestrial, or cosmical causes. All the changes and phenomena of this mighty network lead us to infer the existence of frozen seas up to the Pole itself; and according to my own experience, gained in three expeditions, I consider _that the states of the ice between 82° and 90°_ N.L. _will not essentially differ from those which have been observed south of latitude 82°; I incline rather to the belief that they will be found worse instead of better_.