present wasteful rate of consumption, all our readily attainable coal will be exhausted. The electric transmission and storage of water power is quite another affair. In a country like Norway or Switzerland, for example, where torrents are everywhere near at hand and no home coal attainable, it may pay to use electricity, even though nine-tenths of the original power be wasted in its conversion and reconversion. NORDENSKJÖLD'S NEW EXPEDITION. N the Gentleman's Magazine of July 1880 is a contribution on the in Chapters "), in which I ventured to suggest that "it is the physical configuration of the fringing zone of the Arctic regions, not its mere latitude, that bars the way to the Pole"; this fringing zone being a mountain region which pours down its glaciers into its own valleys and fjords, filling them up to sea-level and throwing off icebergs beyond. If I am right, there may be at 100 miles farther north than the northernmost point attained by our Arctic explorers, a region as much. milder than that which baffled them, as the Arctic Ocean at the North Cape is milder than the Gulf of Bothnia, which is nearly 500 miles farther south. The old geographers described Tornea at the head of this gulf as the Ultima Thule, the uttermost northern limit of man's possible wanderings, and they were not without some justification, as the hills that rise above it seem to bar all farther progress. Yet if a traveller has the hardihood to struggle over about 400 miles of this frigid wilderness, keeping a northerly course all the while, he will come upon the beautiful verdant valley of the Alten and the outspreading waters of the Altenfjord, which he would recognise as rather resembling an Alpine Italian lake than an arm of the Arctic Ocean, in latitude 3 degrees north of the Arctic circle. Not only would he find this remarkable contrast of climate, but also a corresponding social. contrast. Instead of the dreary desolation, with here and there a Lapp encampment, he had left to the southward, he would come upon a flourishing community with a good inn at Bosekop, and men of business and men of pleasure congregated; Englishmen engaged in copper mining and others in salmon fishing. It is quite possible that something analogous to this may be discovered by the exploring traveller who shall penetrate about 100 miles to the north of our present Ultima Thule, or one or two hundred miles inland from some parts of the Greenland coast. Nordenskjöld is about to attempt such an expedition. He evidently takes a view of Arctic physical geography similar to that which I expounded in the above-named essay; he believes in the existence of an Arctic oasis in Greenland, and is about to explore the interior of that unknown land in search of it. If I rightly understand his project, he is not going to play at "follow my leader" up Smith's Sound merely to achieve the glory of being frozen in half a degree farther north than any previous explorer, and then turning back. I suppose that he will sail to Greenland, and select a safe resting place for his ship in a suitable bay that is not the outlet fjord of a system of inland valleys, and consequently a great glacier highway; and that when he starts on his inland journey he will avoid the so-called "paleocrystic ice" over which Markham travelled so laboriously at the rate of about one mile per day. But can he do so? the reader will ask. The reply to this question is afforded by considering that Greenland, like other lands, is made up of hills and dales, valleys and slopes, craggy mountains, rounded humpy mountains, and rolling tablelands, or "fjelds," as they are called in Norway, to distinguish them from Tinds and Pigs, i.e. peaks; Naebs, beaks; Horns, horns; &c. These fjelds when covered with snow and ice, as they are in Greenland, constitute the "fond," as it is called in Norway, or the "nevé" in Switzerland, which is the upper region or source of the glaciers which pour down the valleys. Once attained, this "fond" region may be traversed with comparative ease, the uniformly frozen surface being an aid rather than a hindrance to locomotion. As an example of this, the journey from Tornea, at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, to Alten, on the Arctic Ocean (430 miles), occupies six or seven days in winter, and double that time in summer. The worst months for traversing Greenland will be, I presume, July and August, because these are the warmest, when the continuous Arctic sunshine has done its work in turning crisp snow into wretched sludge; the best months probably May and June, when the sun is always above the horizon, but has not had time to spoil the snow for sledging. HE WHAT NORDENSKJÖLD MAY FIND. E may not find such a genial, luxurious, sunny resting-place as the Kaafjord (the terminal branch of the Altenfjord above described), and he may not be startled, as I was when, on landing there twenty-seven years ago, I heard my name pronounced in friendly greeting by two fashionably-dressed young ladies' residing there in N. lat. 70°, where I expected to find only Lapps and Quains; but he may, if he gets a few degrees farther north, or even no farther north, in the midst of Greenland, meet with a somewhat similar and still more startling greeting. He may come upon a people speaking a language like his own, and linking it with the old classic tongue of the Icelandic poets; for at about the year 1000, when the "old Norse" of the Skalds was still a living language and Greenland was really green, a colony of Norwegians settled there, and were still heard of up to about the end of the fourteenth century. Where are they now? They may have perished, but from what I have seen of the Norwegians who now cultivate on fjelds above the Geirangerfjord farms that are inaccessible to ordinary English tourists, and which remain in the same family that held them when William the Norman conquered England, it is evident that a colony of "hardy Norsemen" could not be exterminated easily. When the change came that glaciated their original settlements, the Greenland colonists probably moved as the ice advanced. If I am right concerning the fringing zone of Arctic mountains, this advance took place along their two prevailing slopes, i.e. landward and seaward. Had the colonists retreated seaward, they must have perished, unless they had the means of embarkation, and this they probably understood. If they retreated landward, a long inland range was open to them, where they might ultimately find gentler slopes and low-lying land, and better climate, where a hardy Norseman could obtain the means of subsistence; but having done this, they would be shut out from further communication with us by the same barrier that resists our approach to them. The flight of birds and other facts indicate the existence of such a food-producing region in the interior of Greenland. With the knowledge of the country possessed by these colonists, they would naturally proceed towards it. The absence of their remains on the Greenland coast indicates that they did not move seawards, and affords presumptive evidence of their movement in the contrary direction. It is, therefore, probable that the discovery of either their living descendants, or the remains of their handiwork, may reward the explorer who shall intelligently avail himself of the They had attended my lectures at Miss Murray's, in Edinburgh, where they were boarders, and their father (or uncle, I forget which), Mr. Thomas, was managing the copper mines, and just elected Member of the Norwegian Parliament, the Storthing. physical configuration of the land, and proceed along the lines of smallest difficulty, to wherever they may lead him. He would thus follow the natural course of the Norse colonists when they retreated rom the grasp of the advancing glaciation of the fourteenth century. ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF METEORIC IRON. NE of the objects of Nordenskjöld's Arctic expedition is a search for cosmic dust and examination of the metallic masses, chiefly composed of iron, that have been observed to lie on the surface of Greenland. If these are really meteors that have fallen on the earth, and if they come from the regions of space towards which the earth is travelling, they should be most abundant in the Arctic regions, seeing that the earth is drifting through space north side foremost. In one of my Science Notes in this Magazine of May, 1881, I suggested that the peculiar distribution of iron as an almost universal yet irregular constituent, or I may say impurity, of all the rocks of the earth's crust, may be due to its meteoric origin. This idea opens out an interesting subject for geological inquiry. Are corresponding rocks of the Southern hemisphere as greatly impregnated with iron as those of the North? The answer to this question is not very easily given, as it demands an average obtained from a large number of different analyses. For example, I find in Bischof's "Chemical and Physical Geology" thirty-four analyses of granites, all North-hemisphere specimens, and in these the quantity of iron varies from a mere trace to 5 per cent. of protoxide, with intermediate random variations indicating accidental introduction; similar irregularities as regards the quantity of iron are shown by the analyses of other rocks or rock constituents. Very few analyses of the geological material of the Southern hemisphere have yet been made. AT A SCIENTIFIC SWINDLE. T the meeting of the Academy of Sciences of Paris, on October 30, 1882, MM. Chatrain and Jacobs described a method of converting the yellow-tinged Cape diamonds into stones of the purest water, by simply immersing them for a while in violet solutions. The colour used being complementary to the yellow, neutralises it, and produces pure white if the light is sufficiently reflected, or it gives what artists describe as "neutral tint" when the reflection is more imperfect. The purchaser of the diamond soon discovers the fraud, as upon washing it regains its original yellow colour. The device is no novelty in principle. The laundress applies it systematically and avowedly in using the familiar "blue" for the purpose of neutralising the inherent yellowness of her results. When pure water is abundantly used and grass bleaching is available there is no need (so far as linen and cotton are concerned) for this familiar sophistication. I knew one family that sent all the linen of a large household to Switzerland to be washed, and I was told that the difference of laundry charges fully covered the cost of carriage. All ordinary white silks and white flannels are dyed blue before coming to the market, the blue sometimes being in excess and plainly visible, as in "Welsh flannels" and some of the "China silks." Raw silk, as it is wound from the cocoon, varies from deep orange to pale lemon or greenish yellow. After bleaching and boiling in potash, i.c. when brought to what is technically known in Coventry as "boiled silk," it is dipped into pale aniline blue to neutralise its still remaining yellow tinge, when white silk is demanded. Hence the disappointment of gentlemen who purchase those elegant white silk pocket-handkerchiefs which, after a few washings, become of dirty yellow colour. But this mere tinting, or neutralisation of tint, is but a very innocent sophistication compared with another that is practised in the dyeing of silk. Some years ago a Coventry dyer showed me a sample of boiled silk which he had to return as "black glacé" at the rate of 60 ounces to the pound. I am told that 70 and 80 are now commonly produced, ie. the dyer has to impregnate the silk with. gummy and mineral matters (such as salts of tin and lead) to such an extent that sixteen ounces of the raw material shall be brought up to the above-named weights. The black silks are the worst, so bad that the crystals of the weighting abominations stiffen the fabric and cut through the small proportion of fibre it contains, with results that are quite familiar to ladies who are victimised by the manufacturers of these weighted fabrics. Even the faint blue dye of white silks is too often weighted with acetate of lead, as may be easily proved by tasting samples of the silk-of" China sewings," for example. Acetate of lead has a sweet taste, hence its name "sugar of lead," and cases have occurred of lead poisoning, to the extent of colic, where the seamstresses who sew the button-holes of white waistcoats have persistently bitten off and sucked the ends of the silk they use when threading their needles. W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS. |