Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/652

636 were conceived, the development of which has caused the nineteenth century to be so sharply distinguished from its predecessors. Now knowledge of the earth is sought for itself, and in this respect the polar research of the present has all at once assumed another aspect, under which it is differentiated from that of the past. Northwestern and northeastern passages have been sought in our days, but not in order to reach India. When Maclure achieved the former in 1852 and Nordenskjöld the latter in 1879, the value attached to the discoveries was not that they furnished routes, but that a correct knowledge of the northern coasts of the two continents and rich stores of other scientific information had been gained by them. Fruits like those, no longer the interests of trade, justified the high prizes which the English Government offered for the discovery of the passage, and the costly expeditions which were dispatched for that purpose. The early trade routes became highways for scientific investigation, and the nature of the polar regions as a whole was inquired into. Such objects were pursued by individuals. Scoresby, while hunting for whales, made constant studies of the highest scientific value of the hydrography, magnetism, and meteorology of the arctic regions; and so did Karl Ludwig Gieseke, afterward Professor of Mineralogy at Dublin, who traveled through East and West Greenland from 1807 to 1813 solely for the thorough study of the geology of their coasts.

Till 1860 the English, and afterward the Americans with them, were in the front as polar explorers. The most important results of their work were the discovery of the magnetic pole in 1831 by John and James Ross, the definition of the coast of arctic America, and numerous single observations. More recently other nations have come forward—the Danes in Greenland, and the Swedes, whose most illustrious representative is Nordenskjöld. Two German expeditions have been sent to East Greenland, an Austrian expedition under Weyprecht and Preyer has discovered Franz-Joseph Land, the Dutch have explored south of Spitzbergen, the Russians on the northern coast of Siberia, and now with Nansen and Mohn the Norwegians have advanced to the very front. In 1882-'83, at the instance of the German Neumayer and the Austrian Weyprecht, a chain of observation stations was established around the pole, to be kept up for a year—an enterprise in which Germany, England, the United States, Russia, Austria, France, Sweden, Norway, and Finland took part. The year 1883 was further marked by Nordensjöld's return from the inland ice of Greenland, and by Nansen's conception of his scheme for traversing Greenland on snowshoes, which he carried into effect the next year. North polar research is therefore almost exclusively the work of the Germanic nations, for the Russian