Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 2 (1878).djvu/326

302 many people have had opportunities of hearing, more or less directly, from the explorers themselves, the chief features of interest in connection with it. It has been left to Sir George Nares, how- ever, to bring together in a connected form, first a plain unvarnished narrative of the voyage ; secondly, the scientific results of the Expedition, including a metorological abstract and an abstract of results obtained. from the tidal observations ; and thirdly, an account of the Ethnology, Zoology, Botany, and Geology, as worked out by specialists in every branch of these sciences from the Reports furnished by the Naturalists to the Expedition, and the collections brought home by them.

With the first and second of these divisions we do not propose to deal ; for the former has been already commented on sufficiently by far more competeut critics than the writer of the present notice, and the latter scarcely falls within the province of a magazine devoted exclusively to Zoology. It is with regard to the third division of the subject that we propose to offer a few remarks, and we are the more disposed to enter into detail on this head, since in all the reviews of this work which have come under our notice, the writers have generally regretted their inability, "for want of space," to deal with the "Appendix," which contains the Natural History of the voyage.

Captain Feilden's contributions last year to 'The Zoologist' on the Ethnology of the Arctic Regions, and the Mammalia of North Greenland and Grinnell Land,* and his excellent paper in 'The Ibis,'t on the species of birds met with by the Arctic Expedition in Smith Sound and northward between the 78th and 83rd degrees of north latitude, may be said to have paved the way for his more extended observations in the first three chapters of the Appendix to the present work. It is unnecessary, therefore, to say much on this portion of the subject, although some of the observations recorded, especially with regard to the northernmost range of the Mammalia met with, are of great interest.

The Walrus, it appears, does not proceed further north than the meeting of the Baffin's Bay and Polar tides near Cape Frazer. On August 31st, 1876, a large seal, Phoca barbata, was shot in Dobbin Bay by Hans, the Greenlander, on board the 'Discovery.' It weighed 510 pounds, and on taking off its skin an Eskimo

'The Zoologist,' 1877, pp. 313—321, 353—361.

'The Ibis,' 1877, pp. 401—412.