This expedition was one of several acting in concert, according to a scheme suggested by Weyprecht, and perfected at international congresses of interested men meeting at Hamburg in 1879 and at St. Petersburg in 1882. This plan was for the establishment by various governments of a ring of stations as far within the Arctic circle as practicable, where simultaneous daily observations of the weather, magnetic conditions, tides, currents, etc., might be made. The arrangement was begun in the summer of 1883, and observing stations were established by Austria on Jan Mayen Island; by Denmark at Godthaab, Greenland; by Germany on Cumberland Bay, west of Davis Straits; by Great Britain at Great Slave Lake, Canada; by Holland at the mouth of the Yenisei; by Norway at Alten Fjiord, Norway; by Russia at the mouth of the Lena, and on Nova Zembla; by Sweden on Spitzbergen; and by the United States at Point Barrow, Alaska, and, farthest north of all, Lady Franklin Bay, Greenland. Nothing need be said about most of these stations—all were successful except the Dutch; but to the last-named belongs a story that Americans will not forget. The command of the Lady Franklin Bay Station was assigned to Lieutenant A. W. Greely—not a naval lieutenant, but, like Schwatka, a cavalry officer, then assigned to duty in the Signal Service, to which (because it then supervised the Weather Bureau) the government had intrusted this matter. A steamer easily conveyed Greely and his party to Lady Franklin Bay, and left them there with a good house ready to be set up, and supplies of all sorts for two years. The prescribed series of observations with barometers and thermometers, wind-gages, tide-gages, magnetic instruments and all the rest, were at once begun, and two winters passed comfortably enough. Dogs and Eskimo drivers had been obtained, and several journeys were made, of which the most important was Lockwood’s advance toward the pole, of which an account has been succinctly supplied by General Greely himself in his admirable “Handbook of Arctic Discoveries.” [Illustration: SCENERY OF GRINNELL LAND AND THE ARCTIC SEA.]