1. The prevailing current in the Spitzbergen sea flows, we are well assured, during nine months of the year, if not all the year round, from the north-east towards the south-west. The velocity of this current may be from five to twenty miles per day, varying in different situations, but is most considerable near the coast of Old Greenland. The current, on the other hand, in the middle of Behring’s Strait, as observed by lieutenant Kotzebue, sets strongly to the north-east, with a velocity, as he thought, of two miles and a half an hour; which is greater, however, by one-half than the rate observed by captain Cook. 2. By the action of the south-westerly current, a vast quantity of ice is annually brought from the north and east, and conducted along the east shore of Old Greenland as far as Cape Farewell, where such masses as still remain undissolved are soon destroyed by the influence of the solar heat and the force of the sea, to which they then become exposed from almost every quarter. This ice being entirely free from salt, and very compact, appears originally to have consisted of field-ice, a kind which perhaps requires the action of frost for many years to bring it to the thickness which it assumes. The quantity of heavy ice, in surface, which is thus annually dissolved, may, at a rough calculation, be stated to be about twenty thousand square leagues, while the quantity annually generated in the regions accessible to the whale-fishers is, probably, not more than one-fourth of that area. As such, the ice, which is so inexhaustible, must require an immense surface of sea for its generation, perhaps the whole or greater part of the so-called “Polar Basin;” the supply required for replacing what is dissolved in Behring’s Strait, where the current sets towards the north, being, probably, of small moment. The current, in opposite parts of the northern hemisphere, being thus found to follow the same line of direction, indicates a communication between the two across the Poles; and the inexhaustible supply of ice, affording about fifteen thousand square leagues, to be annually dissolved above the quantity generated in the known parts of the Spitzbergen seas, supports the same conclusion.