Alas! the enclosure of the stony wave

Is strong, and dark the depths of polar night;
Yet One there is Omnipotent to save.

And this we know, if comfort still we crave,
Into that dark he took with him a light –

The lamp that can illuminate the grave.*

In the application of the public money to Expeditions of Discovery, or, indeed, to any object above vulgar apprehension, the counsellors of the State are exposed to the double taunts of ignorance and faction. In authorizing the recent Searching Expeditions, however, they yielded to the united voice of science and humanity, and neither the bitterness of party, nor the illiberality of the utilitarian school has ventured to impugn the wisdom and generosity of their conduct. The time, doubtless, is not far distant when the call of humanity must subside, and when science must stand alone at the bar of the Treasury, to plead the cause of Arctic Discovery. It is painful to think that a Government could exist in England with whom such a cause should require an advocate; and more painful still that those who rule the destinies of a great maritime nation should grudge the miserable pittance which the State owes to advancing knowledge and civilisation. If God has given man the earth as a freehold, and dominion over its life and its luxuries, it is doubtless the duty of His viceroy to explore his domains, to draw the tribute which they offer, and to send back blessings in return. If human reason has been commissioned to explore the planetary and sidereal regions, it is doubly bound to search the planet which is its home to develop the laws of its structure, and to unfold the mysteries of its birth. "Could the body of the whole earth," says Addison, † "or indeed the whole universe be thus ‡ submitted to the examination of our senses, were it not too big and disproportioned to our inquiries, too unwieldy for the management of the eye and hand, there is no question but it would appear to us as curious and well contrived a frame as that of the human body. We should see the same concatenation and subserviency-the same necessity and usefulness-the same beauty and harmony in all and every of its parts as that we discover in the body of every single animal." Since the expression of this noble thought, which its author considers as new, § nearly a century and a half has been devoted to the study of the rocks, the

+ Spectator, No. 543.

The POLES, a poem in 20 stanzas, in "Hours and Days." By THOMAS BURBIDGE, London, 1851. Like the human body to anatomical observation. "I have been particular," says Addison at the end of his paper, "on the thought which runs through this speculation, because I have not seen it enlarged upon by others."

Importance of the Arctic Expeditions.-Recent Accounts. 489

air, and the ocean-the osteology, the lungs, and the circulation
of the giant earth. We have surveyed the integuments of its
equatorial, and its tropical, and its temperate regions. We have
studied its internal commotions, its respiratory organs
of gas and
of fire-its voice of thunder and of tempest-its daily and its
yearly movements, but we are still ignorant of the structure of
its brain, and of the organs of sensation which it animates. It is
beneath its cap of snow and its crown of ice that we have yet to
discover the poles of its magnetic force, the haunts of its cold,
and the focus of its auroral beams. There, too, we may find new
types of the human kind, and new forms of animal and vege-
table life, thriving in summers without darkness, and in winters
without light. Let Expedition, then, follow Expedition till we
have surveyed "the whole body of the earth." It is man's duty
to complete the survey of the planet which he owns. Reason
demands it of him as a tribute to the All-wise; and Revelation
calls upon him to discover the secrets of His wisdom, and make
known the marvels of His power.

Work Science, work, plumb ocean, scale the sky!
And beyond earth look on for praise on high.

BURBIDGE.

SINCE the preceding Article was printed, we have received farther information respecting the Searching Expeditions, which cannot fail to interest our readers. The ships of the American expedition, when on its return in 1850, drifted into Wellington Channel, and being there involved in the drift ice, were again carried out of it into Lancaster Sound, and along the west side of Baffin's Bay, nearly to Hudson's Straits. They never got clear of the ice during the whole winter, and were frequently on the point of destruction, the crews having several times left the ships, and returned to them again when the crisis was over. From this floating prison of ice the ships were disengaged in spring, and after a fruitless attempt in summer to resume their search in Lancaster Sound, they returned to the United States.

In the spring of 1851, Mr. Rae succeeded in crossing the ice, from the mouth of the Copper Mine River to Victoria Land. Having examined the shores of Wollaston Land, he proved its connexion with Victoria Land, and he traced it westerly and

northwards to within 220 miles of the north coast of Banks's Land, He intended to resume his search in summer if the ice broke up sufficiently to permit him to cross in his boats. He is now on his journey home, and in two months hence we may expect to learn what he has accomplished.

It appears by a letter from Captain Moore of the Plover,* that the pack ice in Behring's Straits has this year extended 160 miles farther south than in either of the two previous summers. His own progress was stopped by it in lat. 70° 34', and long. 169° west; and he fears that the Enterprise will be unable this year to make any progress eastward.

A new plan of search, on scientific grounds, has been just proposed† by Mr. A. Petermann, who thinks that the wide opening between Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla most probably offers the easiest and most advantageous entrance into the open navigable Polar Sea, and perhaps the best route for the search after Sir John Franklin. This proposal proceeds upon the supposition generally received, that Sir John has emerged from Wellington Channel into the Polar Sea. Adopting this supposition, we consider the proposal liable to grave objections of a scientific character. The best meridian by which we can approach the Pole is doubtless that by which it has been most nearly approached, and that is by the meridian between Greenland and Spitzbergen. Along this meridian Captain Parry, on the 23d July 1823, approached within seven degrees and a quarter of it, while Phipps had come within 9° 12', and Scoresby within 8° 30′ of it. This meridian, too, is the warmest on the globe, and that in which each isother mal line recedes farthest from the Equator. Mr. Petermann supports his views, as we do ours, (see page 486,) by the fact of the existence of a pole of maximum cold about Melville Island, though he has not mentioned by whom that pole was discovered. The following opinion of Sir John Barrow will have some weight with those who have not looked at the question in its scientific bearings:

"The theory of Mayer, which Leslie has adopted, and on which has been constructed a formula for ascertaining the mean temperature of the globe, has now been found to assign a much less degree of cold to high latitudes than actually exists. It makes, for instance, that of the North Pole 32°, and of the parallel in which Captain Parry passed the winter 36°, being therefore erroneous by fully as many degrees. Sir David Brewster came to a conclusion much nearer the truth. The ingenious Humboldt, in his memoir on Isothermal Lines, had shown that, in high latitudes, the difference of temperature in the same parallels of the old and new world is very considerable, not less Athenæum, Jan. 17, 1852.

*Times, Jan. 17, 1852.

Scientific Objections to it.

491 than 13° of Fahrenheit in the parallel of 50°, and 17° in that of 60° higher in Europe than in America. He has also shewn that the isothermal lines decline under the eastern meridians of Asia. It had, indeed, long been known, that during the season of the fisheries the temperature of the Spitzbergen Seas, in the latitude of 80°, is higher than that of 70° in Baffin's Bay. On these grounds, and from comparing the thermometric curve of 17° in 78° of latitude on the meridian of Spitzbergen, with that of 65° on the meridian of Melville Island, Sir David Brewster, in a paper of great interest and ingenuity, observes, unless we suppose that the climate of these regions is subject to no law, we are forced to conclude that the Pole of the Globe is not the coldest point of the Arctic Hemisphere, and that there are two points of greatest cold not many degrees from the Pole, and in meridians nearly at right angles to that which passes through the West of Europe.

"The exact position of these Poles is not ascertained; but Sir David Brewster thinks they are situated in about 80° N. latitude, and 95° E, and 100° W. longitudes, or the one 5° to the north of Graham Moore's Bay, and the other 1° to the north of the Bay of Taimura near the north-east cape."*

Quarterly Review, 1821, vol. xxv. pp. 197-8. Dr. Scoresby has taken the same view of the subject in the Edinburgh Encyclopedia.—Art. Polar Regions, vol. xviii. p. 15.

ART. VII.-Memoir of Edward Copleston, D.D., Bishop of Llandaff, with Selections from his Diary and Correspondence. By WILLIAM JAMES COPLESTON, M.A., Rector of Cromhall, Gloucestershire, and late Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. London, 1851.

ASSOCIATED as is the name of Copleston with the revival of learning at Oxford, and with the progress of that academical reform which dates from the beginning of the present century, the announcement of the publication of his biography is at once invested with peculiar interest. We forget and forgive the zeal with which an overstrained loyalty to his alma mater betrayed him long since into the palliation of those defects which he, at the same time, strove so manfully to remove, and regard him rather as one of those faithful and diligent pioneers, who, hoping against hope, and struggling against difficulties, cleared the thickets, and removed the obstructions which time, and neglect, and prejudice, and ignorance, had accumulated in that ancient seat of learning. Of his contemporaries, Whately, Senior, Macbride, and others, still survive, to enter into the rich fruit of those labours, in the burden of which they bore a part; but Eveleigh, Cyril Jackson, John Duncan, Arnold, and other noble spirits of the first half of the nineteenth century, now live only in institutions into which they breathed a new energy, in the intellectual life, which still has to buffet with impediments to its free development in the old English universities, and in the recollection of the few like-minded contemporaries, to whom their memory is sweet. No wonder, then, that we opened, with lively anticipations, a memoir of one of these leading spirits, and that the promise of "extracts from the diary and correspondence" of the late distinguished Provost of Oriel College, beguiled us into an expectation, less of a mere biographical outline of the professed subject of the memoir, than of an insight into the private thoughts and feelings of those other eminent men, mostly now gathered to their fathers, whose names we have been wont to connect with that of Copleston. Possibly, in this calculation, we were not uninfluenced by what is recorded of Pope, that his example, and perhaps assistance, produced the letters of Gay, and Bolingbroke, and Swift; and we thus relied on the promised "correspondence" as likely to afford us that kind of autobiography of Copleston and his contemporaries, which individuals gradually and insensibly compose in the course of their letters, and which have this advantage over professed "memoirs," that they exhibit the sentiments and feel