Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/43

Rh condition fit for identification or description. They must be described and drawn on the spot. A naturalist, skilful with his pencil and sufficiently instructed in the subject to be capable of describing; these animals accurately, might alone find sufficient for his labour, as day after day the vessel sails along, is "hooked on" to an ice-field, or lies at anchor. Nowadays naturalists are not so particular about having a long list of new animals, or rare species. They are more anxious about the range of particular forms of interest, about questions of structure, and other particulars bearing on the philosophical questions of the day. These points can frequently only be made out by dissections on the spot. The large animals will afford plenty of material to the scalpel of the anatomist. What would a home-staying anatomist give, even to dissect on an ice-floe, a narwhal, or a white whale in a fresh or in any condition. He looks back with sadness to Barclay's description of the white whale, the only one we have, and has a tradition that once a narwhal reached Scotland in brine, and was described by an anatomist who has not yet published his descriptions. The northern ranges of the birds, their nesting, their eggs, their changes of plumage, their parasites, and a dozen other points well known to the ornithologist, would give even this unpromising department of Arctic zoölogy some interest, and yield results which science will not despise. The fishes of the Arctic seas, as the discoveries of late years have shown, are not "worked out," and the fresh-water species of the North will be of extreme interest. Let us only take one or two points as illustrating what may be yet done in even the higher groups. One might suppose that, after the Danes had lived in Greenland for one hundred and fifty years, there were not many new mammals to discover in that country. But we have seen, by the discovery within the last few years of three land mammals previously unknown to the fauna, that this is not the case. Take the musk ox (Ovibos moschatus); Fabricius, no doubt, described it under the name of yak (Bos grunniens) as a member of the Greenland fauna, but all he saw was a skull drifted in the ice from the high North. The gradual discoveries of Kane, Hayes, and lastly of Hall, have shown that in the very highest reaches of Smith's Sound it is quite abundant, though entirely unknown south of the glaciers of Melville Bay. Almost contemporaneous with this discovery was that of the German expedition to East Greenland, that in a high-latitude it was abundant on that coast, though quite unknown further to the south. Take, again, the lemming (Myodes torquatus). Scoresby, and afterwards the German expedition, found it on the north-eastern shores of Greenland; but it was quite unknown on the western shores until Dr. Bessels, of Hall's expedition, obtained it from Smith's Sound. Here is a very curious distribution of life, the same animals being found at about the same latitude on both coasts, and yet unknown south of these parallels. The interior, it is believed, is covered with ice. The animals could not have crossed over a stretch of six hundred or seven hundred miles without food. Have they worked their way round the northern end of the continent, and if so, what is the northern termination of Greenland? Is the interior, as is believed by the best informed physical geographers, covered with a great glacial covering? I think the preponderance of facts is in favour of this view, and that the moraine supposed to have been seen on it, near Upernavik, is only local. Further to the south we find no moraine, and if the ice crossed over or infringed on any land in the interior such moraine would be sure to be found in it. Lastly, the ermine (Mustela erminea) has been found on the east coast, though this animal is entirely unknown on the west. The habits of few of the Arctic mammals are well known, and any notes on these would be interesting. The European birds — in large numbers and of many species — every summer migrate to the furthest North. For what purposes do they migrate, and where do they all go to? Professor Newton, of Cambridge, has called attention to the strange movements of the knot (Tringa canutus), which migrates to Greenland and Iceland, but it soon leaves these regions and must move further to the north; but where it goes to is unknown, and of its nidification we know nothing. It comes to Britain in large numbers — old and young birds — in the autumn, but again soon takes its flight to the far South until the following spring. Where does it go during the summer? To regions less sterile than Greenland and Iceland — but where in the North are those regions? Is this expedition to discover them surrounding the shores of that open sea, in the warmer regions which are believed by some to surround the Pole, but 