by the ice that her crew had to leave her, wintering on Lyttelton Island. They left this spot in the early summer of 1872, in two boats, and were eventually picked up by a Scotch whaler. Captain Nares’s expedition followed Hall’s route. I do not propose to enter here into any of the details of the voyage, with which my readers are no doubt familiar. The general history of the expedition must be sketched, however, in order to bring it duly into its place here. The _Alert_ and _Discovery_ sailed under Captains Nares and Stephenson, in May, 1875. Their struggle with the ice did not fairly commence until they were nearing the 79th parallel, where Baffin’s Bay merges into Smith’s Sound. Thence, through Smith’s Sound, Kennedy Channel, and Robeson Channel, they had a constant and sometimes almost desperate struggle with the ice, until they had reached the north end of Robeson Channel. Here the _Discovery_ took up her winter quarters, in north latitude 81° 44´, a few miles north of Captain Hall’s wintering-place, but on the opposite (or westerly) side of Robeson Channel. The _Alert_ still struggled northwards, rounding the north-east point of Grant Land, and there finding, not, as was expected, a continuous coast-line on the west, but a vast icebound sea. No harbour could be found, and the ship was secured on the inside of a barrier of grounded ice, in latitude 82° 31´, in the most northerly wintering-place ever yet occupied by man. The ice met with on this sea is described as “of most unusual age and thickness, resembling in a marked degree, both in appearance and formation, low floating icebergs rather than ordinary salt-water ice. Whereas ordinary ice is from 2 feet to 10 feet in thickness, that in this Polar sea has gradually increased in age and thickness until it measures from 80 feet to 120 feet, floating with its surface at the lower part 15 feet above the water-line. In some places the ice reaches a thickness of from 150 to 200 feet, and the general impression among the officers of the expedition seems to have been that the ice of this Palæocrystic Sea is the accumulation of many years, if not of centuries; “that the sea is never free of it and never open; and that progress to the Pole through it or over it is impossible with our present resources.” The winter which followed was the bitterest ever known by man. For 142 days the sun was not seen; the mercury was frozen during nearly nine weeks. On one occasion the thermometer showed 104° below the freezing-point, and during one terrible fortnight the mean temperature was 91° below freezing!