surveys and explorations completed, which enabled Payer to write the description of Kaiser Franz-Josef Land (pp. 258-270), which shows that other still undefined lands, with an archipelago of islands, have been added to the geography of the earth. But the perils of the expedition did not end here. On the 20th of August, 1874, it was resolved to abandon the _Tegetthoff_ in the ice, and to return in sledges and boats to Europe. Captain Nares tells us, in his telegraphic despatch, that the sledging parties of the _Alert_ and _Discovery_ compassed on an average one-and-a-quarter mile per day on the terrible “Sea of Ancient Ice,” and discovered, after the experience gained in seventy miles passed under these conditions, that the “Pole was impracticable.” If our readers wish to have a conception of the toils and perils of the Austrian sledge parties on their return from the _Tegetthoff_ let them mark the single image presented to the mind by the statement (p. 364):—“After the lapse of two months of indescribable efforts, the distance between us and the ship was not more than nine English miles.” Had the ice on the Novaya Zemlya seas remained as obstinate as it seems to have done in the new desolation, the “Sea of Ancient Ice,” escape would have been as impossible to the _Tegetthoff’s_ crew, as advance towards the Pole was to the sledge parties of our last Arctic expedition. But fortunately, soon after, “leads” opened out in the ice; the boats were launched, and after about another month of alternate rowing and sledging, the ice barrier was happily reached in the unusually high latitude 77° 40′; and the brave men who three months before had left the _Tegetthoff_ were saved. This is perhaps the most marked analogy between the perils of the two expeditions; so far as those of our own are yet known. But the scientific conclusions of Lieutenant Payer, as set forth in the general Introduction to his narrative, strikingly harmonize with the actual discoveries of the _Alert_ and _Discovery_. Already it is authoritatively announced, that there is no open Polar Sea; that this hypothesis is as baseless as the existence of President’s Land. In the fourth chapter of that Introduction (pp. 25-31), our author has analysed with great sagacity the various theories on which that hypothesis was made to rest, working up to the conclusion, that no such sea exists. The demonstration of experience now takes the place of enlightened argument and opinion; fact and theory are here at one.