t of view, whether the expedition passes over the polar point
itself or at some distance from it."

In this lecture I had submitted the most important data on which my
plan was founded; but in the following years I continued to study
the conditions of the northern waters, and received ever fresh proofs
that my surmise of a drift right across the Polar Sea was correct. In
a lecture delivered before the Geographical Society in Christiania,
on September 28, 1892, I alluded to some of these inquiries. [10] I
laid stress on the fact that on considering the thickness and extent
of the drift-ice in the seas on both sides of the Pole, one cannot
but be struck by the fact that while the ice on the Asiatic side,
north of the Siberian coast, is comparatively thin (the ice in which
the Jeannette drifted was, as a rule, not more than from 7 to 10
feet thick), that on the other side, which comes drifting from the
north in the sea between Greenland and Spitzbergen, is remarkably
massive, and this, notwithstanding that the sea north of Siberia is
one of the coldest tracts on the earth. This, I suggested, could be
explained only on the assumption that the ice is constantly drifting
from the Siberian coast, and that, while passing through the unknown
and cold sea there is time for it to attain its enormous thickness,
partly by freezing, partly by the constant packing that takes place
as the floes screw themselves together.

I further mentioned in the same lecture that the mud found on this
drift-ice seemed to point to a Siberian origin. I did not at the time
attach great importance to this fact, but on a further examination
of the deposits I had collected during my Greenland expedition
it appeared that it could scarcely come from anywhere else but
Siberia. On investigating its mineralogical composition, Dr. Toernebohm,
of Stockholm, came to the conclusion that the greater part of it must
be Siberian river mud. He found about twenty different minerals in
it. "This quantity of dissimilar constituent mineral parts appears to
me," he says, "to point to the fact that they take their origin from
a very extensive tract of land, and one's thoughts naturally turn to
Siberia." Moreover, more than half of this mud deposit consisted of
humus, or boggy soil. More interesting, however, than the actual mud
deposit were the diatoms found in it, which were examined by Professor
Cleve, of Upsala, who says: "These diatoms are decidedly marine (i.e.,
take