It very probably would not be difficult, under such circumstances as Sir W. Parry has since recommended, to reach the North Pole along this route. Then (especially if it be true, as many believe, that there is a region of open sea about the Pole itself) we might find it as easy to reach Behring Straits by travelling in a straight line over the North Pole, as by threading the straits and bays north of America. We turn our course until we have in sight a portion of the ice-barred eastern coast of Greenland, Shannon Island. Somewhere about this spot in the seventy-fifth parallel is the most northern part of that coast known to us. Colonel--then Captain--Sabine in the _Griper_ was landed there to make magnetic, and other observations; for the same purpose he had previously visited Sierra Leone. That is where we differ from our forefathers. They commissioned hardy seamen to encounter peril for the search of gold ore, or for a near road to Cathay; but our peril is encountered for the gain of knowledge, for the highest kind of service that can now be rendered to the human race. Before we leave the Northern Sea, we must not omit to mention the voyage by Spitzbergen northward, in 1818, of Captain Buchan in the _Dorothea_, accompanied by Lieutenant Franklin, in the _Trent_. It was Sir John Franklin's first voyage to the Arctic regions. This trip forms the subject of a delightful book by Captain Beechey. On our way to the south point of Greenland we pass near Cape North, a point of Iceland. Iceland, we know, is the centre of a volcanic region, whereof Norway and Greenland are at opposite points of the circumference. In connection with this district there is a remarkable fact; that by the agency of subterranean forces, a large portion of Norway and Sweden is being slowly upheaved. While Greenland, on the west coast, as gradually sinks into the sea, Norway rises at the rate of about four feet in a century. In Greenland, the sinking is so well known that the natives never build close to the water's edge, and the Moravian missionaries more than once have had to move farther inland the poles on which their boats are rested.