1. The eagerness of human nature for gain and material prosperity is so great, that we are wont to estimate the value of all undertakings by the standard of utility; and too often it is forgotten, that each generation is destined to fulfil the task of acquiring and collecting the knowledge which is to benefit only a later generation. If, then, the Polar question be valueless for our material interests, is it therefore valueless for science? and assuming that it is for the present worthless as far as gain and wealth are concerned, must it continue so for all time? Not that we are entitled, even from this narrower point of view, to deny the usefulness of Polar exploration, as Cook seems to have done when he said, “Never from those regions will any advantage accrue to our race;” but rather bear in mind what Sir James Ross tells us: “The profit which accrued to England, in each year after the voyage (1818) of my uncle (Sir John Ross) in North Baffin’s Bay, from those rediscovered parts of the Arctic seas, was more than enough to defray all the expenses of the voyages of discovery undertaken from 1818 to 1838.” Scoresby with his single ship made a million thalers by the capture of whales, and the Americans had for many years a clear profit of eight million dollars from the fisheries of the frozen seas of Behring’s Straits. There were also, it is true, very considerable losses; for, in 1830, nineteen English ships engaged in the whale fishery were “beset” in the ice of Melville Bay, and nearly all destroyed; in 1871, twenty-six American ships were crushed to pieces in Behring’s Straits, and as many as seventy-three Dutch vessels sank in one year in the seventeenth century from the pressure of the ice.