Page:Polar Exploration - Bruce - 1911.djvu/219

Rh have seen at one time the Black Isle and the waters of the Moray Firth, the Pentland Hills (or Arthur's Seat), Barra Head (100 miles distant), and the coast of Ireland (120 miles distant), though it is unlikely that one could ever see Ben Nevis from sea-level at Barra Head.

"The information furnished by the pilot balloons, which carry no instrument because they are sacrificed, concerns questions of capital importance for meteorology—the direction and the velocity of the upper currents. Now our pilot balloons of 1906 have taught us that there exist in the Arctic Regions in the neighbourhood of the 80th parallel, at a height of about 13,600 metres (44,600 ft.), certain winds of 60 metres per second (132 miles per hour), a force of which we have no equivalent at the surface of the globe. Their direction was S. 68° W."

The Prince of Monaco made thirty explorations of the high atmosphere in the Arctic Regions in the vicinity of Spitsbergen in 1906, and, in carrying out this work, added more to our knowledge, not only of the meteorology of the Arctic Regions, but also of our knowledge of the meteorology of the world than almost any recent investigator. This is more especially the case because before and since he has carried out further