SWEDEN AND NORWAY, _July_ 1877.

The exploring expeditions, which, during the recent decades, have
gone out from Sweden towards the north, have long ago acquired a
truly national importance, through the lively interest that has been
taken in them everywhere, beyond, as well as within, the fatherland;
through the considerable sums of money that have been spent on them
by the State, and above all by private persons; through the
practical school they have formed for more than thirty Swedish
naturalists; through the important scientific and geographical
results they have yielded; and through the material for scientific
research, which by them has been collected for the Swedish
Riks-Museum, and which has made it, in respect of Arctic natural
objects, the richest in the world. To this there come to be added
discoveries and investigations which already are, or promise in the
future to become, of practical importance; for example, the
meteorological and hydrographical work of the expeditions; their
comprehensive inquiries regarding the Seal and Whale Fisheries in
the Polar Seas; the pointing out of the previously unsuspected
richness in fish, of the coasts of Spitzbergen; the discoveries, on
Bear Island and Spitzbergen, of considerable strata of coal and
phosphatic minerals which are likely to be of great economic
importance to neighbouring countries; and, above all, the success of
the two last expeditions in reaching the mouths of the large
Siberian rivers, navigable to the confines of China--the Obi and
Yenisej--whereby a problem in navigation, many centuries old, has
at last been solved.

But the very results that have been obtained incite to a
continuation, especially as the two last expeditions have opened a
new field of inquiry, exceedingly promising in a scientific, and I
venture also to say in a practical, point of view, namely, the part
of the Polar Sea lying east of the mouth of the Yenisej. Still, even
in our days, in the era of steam and the telegraph, there meets us
here a territory to be explored, which is new to science, and
hitherto untouched. Indeed, the whole of the immense expanse of
ocean which stretches over 90 degrees of longitude from the mouth of
the Yenisej past Cape Chelyuskin--the Promontorium Tabin of the old
geographers--has, if we except voyages in large or small boats along
the coast, never yet been ploughed by the keel of any vessel, and
never seen the funnel of a steamer.

It was this state