In Continental Europe, the only Polar Lands, properly so called, are Russian Lapland and the deeply-indented coast of Northern Russia. To the north of the most advanced point of that coast, and separated from the continent by a narrow arm of the sea, lie three almost contiguous islands, which form Nova Zembla (lat. 68° 50' to 76° north); desert islands, inhabited by a few fishermen, and containing a few vegetables and animals. The western side of the group is traversed by a mountain-range 2000 feet in height. Finally, almost in the centre of the Frozen Sea, and at nearly equal distances from the Old and the New World, rises the gloomy archipelago of Spitzbergen (that is, the Peaked Mountains), first visited by Barentz in 1596, and lying between the parallels of 77° and 81°, and the meridians of 10° and 24° east of Greenwich. Their summits, I need hardly tell you, are shrouded in eternal ice and snow, and separated by narrow valleys, or rather ravines, mostly occupied with those slowly-moving ice-rivers called glaciers. The surrounding seas swarm with fish, and the frozen wastes of the islands are haunted by the Arctic fox, the reindeer, and the white bear. The walrus and the seal live upon their shores, which bristle everywhere with lofty granitic rocks, and glaciers that plunge down into the very waters. Their extremities are constantly throwing off huge masses of ice, which float out to sea, and in the shape of icebergs appal and threaten the mariner. Except during a brief interval of summer, the access to Spitzbergen is barred by a formidable barrier of ice, and the channels between the different islands are so blocked up by the same material, that it was long doubted whether Spitzbergen was not one large island deeply fissured and intersected by creek and gulf. It is wholly uninhabited, but the voyager landing at certain points of the coast--in Madeleine Bay, for example--treads at every step upon human bones thickly scattered over the snow, pell-mell with the bones of bears and seals, and upon the ghastly memorials of empty or half-open coffins. These are the remains, the last relics, of unfortunate seamen slain by cold and hunger in these desolate regions. For want of strength to dig decent graves, on account of the thickness of the ice, the survivors load the coffins with pieces of rock to act as a rampart against the wild beasts. But "the great man in a pelisse," as the Norwegian hunters denominate the white bear, has stout arms, and, impelled by famine, he frequently succeeds in displacing the stones, and making a hideous banquet off the frozen bodies. * * * * *