The preliminary portion of their studies being over, Clarke and his pupil began to prepare for their travels. Two other individuals were at first associated with them, Professor Malthus, author of the celebrated treatise on population, and the Rev. Mr. Otter, afterward the biographer of our traveller. The party set out from Cambridge on the 20th May, 1799, and arrived at Hamburgh on the 25th. Here they made but a short stay before they set out for Copenhagen, and from thence, by way of Stockholm, across the whole of Sweden to Tornea, on the Gulf of Bothnia. Malthus and Otter left them at the Wener Lake. Clarke, with all the enthusiasm of a genuine traveller, could never imagine he had carried his researches sufficiently far; but, having reached the 66th degree of northern latitude, declared he would not return until he should have snuffed the polar air. His pupil, Cripps, seems to have shared largely in his locomotive propensity, and in the courage which prompts to indulge it. They therefore proceeded towards the polar regions together; but having reached Enontakis, in latitude 68° 30´ 30´´ north, our traveller, who had previously been seized by a severe fit of illness, was constrained to abandon the polar expedition and shape his course towards the south. Writing from Enontakis to his mother, “We have found,” says he, “the cottage of a priest in this remote corner of the world, and have been snug with him a few days. Yesterday I launched a balloon eighteen feet in height, which I had made to attract the natives. You may guess their astonishment when they saw it rise from the earth. “Is it not famous to be here within the frigid zone, more than two degrees within the arctic, and nearer to the pole than the most northern shores of Iceland? For a long time darkness has been a stranger to us. The sun, as yet, passes not below the horizon, but he dips his crimson visage behind a mountain to the north. This mountain we ascended, and had the satisfaction to see him make his courtesy without setting. At midnight the priest of this place lights his pipe during three weeks in the year by means of a burning-glass from the sun’s rays.”