“You think I’m not serious, but I am, really and truly!” said Ross. “I was thinking of the changes this district of the North Pole has undergone. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago it was as it is now—a beautiful, warm climate; then came a time when things changed and all turned to ice, and the trees were covered with snow, all approach being cut off by an impassable barrier of ice, although even then many explorers believed that at the Pole it was not all frozen; and in 1878 or 1879, when the explorer Nordenskiold was locked in the ice in Northern Siberia, and this ice extended as far as he could see, he proved that here at the North Pole no ice existed; and another explorer, Admiral Wrangell, I believe, when he was journeying north from Siberia, found the ice getting thinner and thinner as he advanced and the climate becoming warmer until he actually got to unbroken and unfrozen sea and a temperate climate. This was confirmed later by such authorities as Anjou Hedenström and others. And still later, between 1905 and 1910, mammoths, stacks of peat, _living_ but frozen trees, were found by explorers; then a few years later, the conquest of the air began to be felt as a practical possibility, and science generally made enormous strides—the time from 1900, or say from 1850 to 1950, was a century of the greatest scientific triumphs of all time, and electricity became so much used that the climate of the world altered and the terrible barriers of ice at the poles became no longer impassable. Then followed, in actual reality, the conquest of the air, which caused a complete revolution in mechanical progress. After this came a period of intense scientific research, and about a hundred years ago was made the great ‘discovery’—which had been expected centuries before—that _life originated_ at the North Pole (from whence its germs were wafted all over the world by air and water), and the South Pole saw its passage to higher and more noble existences.