s winter station. The
scientific man indeed knows that this neglect has, in most cases,
been occasioned by the great infrequency of the strongly luminous
aurora just in the Franklin archipelago on the north coast of
America, where most of the Arctic winterings of this century have
taken place, but scarcely any journey of exploration has at all
events been undertaken to the uninhabited regions of the high north,
which has not in its working plan included the collection of new
contributions towards dealing up the true nature of the aurora and
its position in the heavens. But the scientific results have seldom
corresponded to the expectations which had been entertained. Of
purely Arctic expeditions, so far as I know, only two, the
Austrian-Hungarian to Franz Josef Land (1872-74) and the Swedish to
Mussel Bay (1872-73), have returned with full and instructive lists
of auroras[262] Ross, PARRY, KANE, McCLINTOCK, HAYES, NARES, and
others, have on the other hand only had opportunities of registering
single auroras; the phenomenon in the case of their winterings has
not formed any distinctive trait of the Polar winter night. It was
the less to be expected that the _Vega_ expedition would form an
exception in this respect, as its voyage happened during one of the
years of which we knew beforehand that it would be a minimum aurora
year. It was just this circumstance, however, which permitted me to
study, in a region admirably suited for the purpose, a portion of
this natural phenomenon under uncommonly favourable circumstances.
For the luminous arcs, which even in Scandinavia generally form
starting-points for the radiant auroras, have here exhibited
themselves undreamed by the more splendid forms of the aurora I have
thus, undisturbed by subsidiary phenomena, been able to devote
myself to the collection of contributions towards the ascertaining
of the position of these luminous arcs, and I believe that I have in
this way come to some very remarkable conclusions, which have been
developed in detail in a separate paper printed in _The Scientific
Work of the Vega Expedition_ (Part I. p. 400). Here space permits me
only to make the following statement.

The appearance of the aurora at Behring's Straits in 1878-79 is shown in
the accompanying woodcuts. We never saw here the magnificent bands or
draperies of rays which we are so accustomed to in Scandinavia, but only
halo-like luminous arcs, which hour after hour, day after day, were