A noble creature is the Polar bear, says Sherard Osborn, whether we speak of him by the learned titles of “Ursus maritimus,” “Thalassarctos maritimus,” or the sailors’ more expressive nomenclature of “Jack Rough!” With all her many wonders, continues this lively writer, never did Nature create a creature more admirably adapted to the life it has to lead. Half flesh, half fish, the seaman wandering in the inhospitable regions of the North cannot but be struck with the appearance of latent energy and power its every action attests, as it rolls in a lithe and swaggering way over the rough surface of the frozen sea; or, during the brief Arctic summer, haunts the broken and treacherous “pack” in search of its prey. When not too loaded with fat--and it seems to fatten readily--the pace of the bear is leisurely and easy, yet at its slowest it is equal to that of a good pedestrian; and when alarmed or irritated, its speed is surprising, though not graceful. On level ice, it flings itself ahead, as it were, by a violent jerking motion of the powerful fore paws, in what has been described as an “ungainly gallop;” but it always makes, when it can, for rough ice, where its strength and agility are best displayed, and where neither man nor dog can overtake it. In the Queen’s Channel, during Captain M’Clure’s expedition, more than one bear was seen making its way over broken-up ice, rugged and precipitous as the mind can picture, with a truly wonderful facility; their powerful fore paws and hind legs enabling them to spring from piece to piece, scaling one fragment and sliding down another with the activity of a huge quadrumane rather than that of a quadruped. Evidently it is conscious of its superiority in such rough and perilous ground, and is generally found at the edge of the belts of hummocks or broken ice which intersect most ice-fields, or else amongst the frozen pack-ice of channels such as Barrow’s and the Queen’s.