question--what becomes of the great quantity of salt that
is thus being carried perpetually into the polar basin? Manifestly it
must be carried out again by the surface-current, otherwise the polar
basin would of necessity become a basin of salt. The under-current
_must_, therefore, rise to the surface somewhere near the pole, with its
temperature necessarily only a little, if at all, below the
freezing-point--which, be it observed, is a _warm_ temperature for such
regions. Here, then, where the warm waters from the south rise to the
surface, it is supposed this open Arctic Ocean must exist.

So much for theory. Now for facts that have been observed, and that
tend, more or less, to corroborate this proposition of an open polar
sea. The habits of the whale have gone far to prove it. The log-books
of whalers have for many years been carefully examined and compared by
scientific men. These investigations have led to the discovery "that
the tropical regions of the ocean are to the `right' whale as a sea of
fire, through which he cannot pass, and into which he never enters." It
has also been ascertained that the same kind of whale which is found off
the shores of Greenland, in Baffin's Bay, etcetera, is found in the
North Pacific, and about Behring's Straits; and that the `right' whale
of the southern hemisphere is a different animal from that of the
northern. How, then, came the Greenland whales to pass from the
Greenland seas to the Pacific? Not by the Capes Horn or Good Hope; the
"sea of fire" precluded that. Clearly there was ground here for
concluding that they did so through the (supposed) open sea lying
beyond, or rather within, the frozen ocean.

It is true the objection might be made, that the same kind of whale
which exists in the North Pacific exists also in the North Atlantic,
although they never cross over to see each other. But another discovery
has met this objection.

It is the custom among whalers to have their harpoons marked with date
and name of ship, and Dr Scoresby, in his work on arctic voyages
mentions several instances of whales having been taken near Behring's
Straits, with harpoons in them bearing the stamp of ships that were
known to cruise in the Greenland seas; and the dates on the harpoons
were so recent as to preclude the supposition that the said whales had,
after being struck, made a voyage round the capes above mentioned,--even
were such a voyage possible to them. All this d