This was to be the garrison of the International Circumpolar Station at Lady Franklin Bay. The idea of a ring of stations round the Pole for the study of the natural phenomena for which the Arctic regions afford so wide and important a field was not new, but it was first reduced to definiteness and its adoption secured by Karl Weyprecht of the Austro-Hungarian expedition of 1872. At a meeting of German scientific men at Gratz, in September, 1875, he procured assent to his general principle that the best results in Arctic inquiry were to be obtained by subordinating geographical discovery to physical investigation. It had long been evident that the most valuable results had been obtained by the ships and fixed observatories, and that the toilsome work of the sledges in their successive approaches by a few more miles towards a mathematical point, though most interesting to read about, had really been of very little practical use owing to the necessarily light equipment. Instead, therefore, of a number of isolated attempts at irregular intervals, Weyprecht suggested that the better way would be to attack the subject systematically by a group of expeditions at permanent stations working together long enough at the same time for their observations to be dealt with as part of a general scheme; and the suggestion was approved although he did not live long enough to see the stations occupied. [Illustration: GREENLAND] Three International Polar Conferences were held, in 1879 and the two following years, at Hamburg, Berne, and St. Petersburg, at the last of which it was arranged that the stations should be fourteen in number, two in the south and twelve in the north, these twelve being—(1) The Austrian at Jan Mayen; (2) the Danish at Godthaab; (3) the Finnish at Sodankyla in Uleaborg; (4) the German at Kingua in Cumberland Sound; (5) the British at Fort Rae on the northern arm of the Great Slave Lake; (6) the Dutch at Dickson Harbour at the mouth of the Yenesei; (7) the Norwegian at Bosekop at the head of Alten Fiord; (8) the Russian at Little Karmakul Bay in Novaya Zemlya; (9) the second Russian on Sagastyr Island in the Lena Delta; (10) the Swedish at Mossel Bay in Spitsbergen; (11) the American at Point Barrow under Lieutenant P. H. Ray, who met with marked success and brought his men all home in safety; and (12) the second American at Lady Franklin Bay, the winter quarters of H.M.S. _Discovery_, which Greely renamed Fort Conger.