and make such explorations as might be found practicable in the direction of the North Pole. The United States Government manifested no inclination to equip an expedition for the above purposes, and Dr. Hayes was therefore under the necessity of appealing to his countrymen to contribute funds for the enterprise. These were at length forthcoming, and, in the early part of 1860, Dr. Hayes found himself master of a schooner of 133 tons burden, with a crew of fourteen persons. The second in com tion and of external defence, that the complete unification of the country should be carried out as soon as possible. The sooner a commencement is made by the conclusion of arrangements upon those points to which the King referred in his speech, the better for all parties. For our own part we cordially re-echo the prayer with which the King concluded his address. We have no other wish and no other interest than that Germany should be free, united, and powerful that she should fully realize" the dream of centuries, the yearning and striv-mand was Mr. A. Sonntag, who threw up a ing of the latest generations." Upon the prudence, the wisdom, and above all, the moderation of the deputies now assembled at Berlin, the speedy fulfilment of the national aspirations mainly depends. We hope that they will not prove unworthy of the trust reposed in them; and that they will not, in grasping at a shadow, lose the substance which is within their reach. From the Athenæum. The Open Polar Sea: a Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery towards the North Pole, in the Schooner" United States." By Dr. I. I. Hayes. (Low & Co.) WHEN we parted from Dr. Hayes on the occasion of reviewing his Arctic Boat Journey' in this journal (May, 1860) we felt sure that, unless barred by circumstances beyond his control, we should meet him again in the same waters. "On revient toujours à ses premiers amours," applies with peculiar force to adventurers; and those who love the excitement of wild travel, with its attendant perils, are generally found eager and ready to set forth again, even when the blood is no longer young, in quest of adventures by flood and field. So it was with poor Franklin, who, having early imbibed a passion for the sea, eagerly seized the opportunity of passing from the to him dull monotony of life at home to the dangers and hardships of Arctic exploration. Government appointment of AssociateDirector of the Dudley Astronomical Observatory to accompany Dr. Hayes. The small craft was efficiently equipped, and nothing was wanting to make the expedition successful, except auxiliary steam-power, now found to be absolutely necessary for efficient Arctic exploration. The expedition left Boston on the 6th of July, 1860, and returned to that port in October, 1861. The story of this last Arctic enterprise is most stirring, and it is well for Dr. Hayes's literary venture that this is the case, for it must be conceded that the great number of works on Arctic voyages has somewhat dulled the edge of curiosity with which they were formerly received by the public. But a spell of fascination will ever cling to the narrative of brave and adventurous travel, and Dr. Hayes's heroism and endurance are of no common order. After a not un prosperous voyage, the explorers reached Upernavik on the 12th of August, obtained six Esquimaux interpreters, hunters and dog-drivers, with a fine team of dogs, and then resumed their way north. The schooner battled gallantly with the middle ice, dodging enormous icebergs which continually threatened to crush her. One of these icy monsters was upwards of three-quarters of a mile long, nearly of the same breadth, and 315 feet above the water. It was calculated to contain twenty-seven thousand million cubic feet, and to weigh two thousand million tons. Difficulties now increased daily, and besides those arising from icebergs and the pack-ice, a current from the north set strongly against them, and the hours, if not minutes, of the schooner seemed numbered. True to his early love, Dr. Hayes had no sooner returned from his adventurous voyage, which, as will be remembered, involved Off Cape Hatherton," says Dr. Hayes, his little party and himself in extraordinary perils, than he commenced organizing an extensive scheme of Arctic search. The main features were to pass up Smith Sound, complete the survey of the north coasts of Greenland and Grennell Land, "the scene around us was as imposing as it was alarming. Except the earthquake and volcano, there is not in nature an exhibition of force comparable with that of the ice-fields of the Arctic Seas. They close together, when driven by the wind or by currents against the land or other resisting object, with the pressure of millions of moving tons, and the crash and noise and confusion are truly terrific. We were now in the midst of one of the most thrilling of these exhibitions of Polar dynamics, and we become uncomfortably conscious that the schooner was to become a sort of dynamometer. Vast ridges were thrown up wherever the floes came together, to be submerged again when the pressure was exerted in another quarter; and over the sea around us these pulsating lines of uplift, which in some cases reached an altitude of not less than sixty feet, higher than our mast-head, - told of the strength and power of the enemy which was threatening us. We had worked ourselves into a triangular space formed by the contact of three fields. At first there was plenty of room to turn round, though no chance to escape. We were nicely docked, and vainly hoped that we were safe; but the corners of the protecting floes were slowly crushed off, the space narrowed little by little, and we listened to the crackling and crunching of the ice, and watched its progress with consternation. At length the ice touched the schooner, and it appeared as if her destiny was sealed. She groaned like a conscious thing in pain, and writhed and twisted as if to escape her adversary, tremb'ing in every timber from truck to kelson. Her sides seemed to be giving way. Her deck timbers were bowed up, and the seams of the deck planks were opened. I gave up for lost the little craft which had gallantly carried us through so many scenes of peril; but her sides were solid and her ribs strong; and the ice on the port side, working gradually under the bilge, at length, with a jerk which sent us all reeling, lifted her out of the water; and the floes, still pressing on and breaking, as they were crowded together, a vast ridge was piling up beneath and around us; and, as if with the elevating power of a thousand jackscrews, we found ourselves going slowly up into the air." The schooner escaped, though not without being seriously damaged. Under more favourable circumstances she was navigated into Hartstene Bay, and made snug for the winter in a harbour to which Dr. Hayes has given the name of Port Foulke. The huge cliffs of the west coast of Greenland rose behind them, broken in places by ravines in which the hunters found large herds of deer. In a single hour Dr. Hayes killed three, and men and dogs feasted on excellent venison. This abundant commissariat was most encouraging, and tends strongly to confirm the belief that the interior of Greenland is favourable for the support of animal life. An observatory was erected near the schooner; and when the daily routine, work had been organized, Dr. Hayes made an exploratory journey over the great Mer de Glace glacier which joins that of Humbolt. This was a formidable undertaking; the temperature had fallen to 34° below zero; and a fierce storm prevailed. In the teeth of this the party travelled seventy miles over the ice at an altitude of 5,000 feet above the level of the sea, and in the midst of a vast frozen sahara immeasurable to the human eye. Yet under these difficulties Dr. Hayes succeeded in taking angles and various measurements which, having been repeated in July, 1861, showed that the rate of progress of this tremendous glacier is upwards Thus what is true of a hundred feet daily. of the Alpine valleys is true, also, of those in Greenland. A great frozen flood is pouring continuously down the west slopes of the Greenland continent, the law of supply and waste being the same in both cases. A The monotony of the long and dreary winter was diversified by a rise of temperature which set in early in November. The wind, says Dr. Hayes, writing on the 14th of this month, though blowing steadily for is twenty-four hours from the north-east, accompanied by remarkable warmth. The thermometer, which had gone down to 40 below zero, now marked 41°. “I have done with speculation. This temperature makes mischief with my theories, as facts have heretofore done with theories of the wiser men." Of course this meteorological phenomenon favours the theory of an open polar sea, and filled Dr. Hayes with hope that he would soon navigate its waters. far less pleasant incident was the breaking out of an epidemic among the dogs. The animals were attacked by the same disease which has been prevalent for some years among the dogs in South Greenland. Up to the 1st of December, they remained in perfect health; but after that date they were seized by fatal illness, which manifested itself by great restlessness, furious barking, and rushing violently to and fro, as if in mortal dread of some imaginary object from which they were endeavouring to fly. The terrible disease ran its course in a few hours, and by it the expedition was rendered nearly dogless. Under these circumstances, which threatened to be fatal to the expedition, Mr. Sonntag undertook to visit the Esquimaux on Northumberland Island for the purpose of procuring a fresh supply of these valuable animals. Unfortunately, this officer perished in the attempt, although the object of his journey was successful. Reinforced by dogs and Esquimaux, Dr., Hayes now organized a sledge expedition, and on the 16th of March started up Smith Sound. The incidents of this journey are thrilling. After encountering innumerable difficulties, Dr. Hayes found himself half way across the Sound with his party nearly disabled. To continue the struggle in a body was out of the question. fore experienced to an equal degree, I climbed the steep hill-side to the top of a ragged cliff, which I supposed to be about eight hundred feet above the level of the sea. The view which I had from this elevation furnished a solution of the cause of my progress being arrested on the previous day. The ice was everywhere in the same condition as in the mouth of the bay, across which I had endeavoured to pass. A broad crack, starting from the middle of the "The men are completely used up, broken bay, stretched over the sea, and uniting with down, dejected, to the last degree. Human other cracks as it meandered to the eastward, nature cannot stand it. There is no let up to it expanded as the delta of some mighty river it. Cold, penetrating to the very sources of discharging into the ocean, and under a waterlife, dangers from frost and dangers from heavy sky, which hung upon the northern and eastlifting, labours which have no end,- - a heartless ern horizon, it was lost in the open sea. Standsticking in the mud, as it were all the time; ing against the dark sky at the north, there and then comes snow-blindness, cheerless was seen in dim outline the white sloping sumnights, with imperfect rest in snow-huts, pierc-mit of a noble headland, the most northern ing storms, and unsatisfying food. This the known land upon the globe. I judged it to daily experience, and this the daily prospect a be in latitude 82° 39', or 450 miles from the head; to-day closing upon us in the same vast North Pole. Nearer, another bold cape stood ice jungle as yesterday. My party have, I must forth; and nearer still the headland, for which own, good reason to be discouraged; for hu- I had been steering my course the day before, man beings were never before so beset with rose majestically from the sea, as if pushing up difficulties and so inextricably tangled in a into the very skies a lofty mountain peak, upon wilderness. We got into a cul-de-sac to-day, which the winter had dropped its diadem of and we had as much trouble to surmount the snows. There was no land visible except the lofty barrier which bounded it as Jean Valjean coast upon which I stood. The sea beneath to escape from the cul-de-sac-Genrot to the con- me was a mottled sheet of white and dark vent yard. But our convent-yard was a hard patches, these latter being either soft decaying old foe, scarce better than the hummocked ice or places where the ice had wholly disapbarrier." peared. These spots were heightened in iatensity of shade and multiplied in size as they receded, until the belt of the water-sky blended them altogether into one uniform colour of dark blue. The old and solid floes (some a the massive ridges and wastes of hummocked quarter of a mile and others miles across) and ice which lay piled between them and around their margins, were the only parts of the sea which retained the whiteness and solidity of winter." Under these adverse circumstances, the disabled men were sent back to the schooner, and Dr. Hayes, with three men and fourteen dogs, continued the exploration. From this point of departure to the return of the forlorn hope to the ship, Dr. Hayes's narrative reads like a wild romance. At length they reached Grinnell Land. As they proceeded north they experienced, in even a greater degree than in Smith Sound, the immense force of ice-pressure resulting from the southerly set of the current. Every point of land exposed to the north was buried under massive ice. Many blocks, from thirty to sixty feet thick, and of much greater breadth, were lying high and dry upon the beach, pushed up by the pack even above the level of the highest tides No glaciers were, however, met with on any portion of Grinnell Land. Struggling on, amidst difficulties which would have arrested any one less bold or enduring than Dr. Hayes, the little party were at length stopped, precisely as Parry had been stopped on his expedition over the ice to the North Pole, viz., by the inability of the ice to bear them. This was the crowning feat of Dr. Hayes's enterprise. He set up a cairn, within which he deposited a record, stating that after a toilsome march of forty-six days from his winter harbour, he stood on the shores of the Polar basin, on the most northerly land ever reached by man. latitude attained was 81° 35'; that reached by Parry over the ice was 82° 45'. The Dr. Hayes regained the schooner on the 3rd of June, having travelled 1,600 miles. He was now desirous to navigate his small ship into the Polar Sea, but she was found to be far too much damaged for such an enterprise. He accordingly wisely resolved on returning home to refit and add steampower to his resources. But when he put into Halifax for necessary repairs, he heard that his country was plunged into civil war; "After a most profound and refreshing sleep, and instead of commanding another Arctic inspired by a weariness which I had rarely be-expedition, Dr. Hayes was placed at the WE should be sorry to say anything that would unnecessarily disturb the peace of ladies in their compliance with the present remarkable fashion of wearing chignons. The custom may seem very irrational to the male half of mankind, but this objection would apply to many of the fashions by which ladies consider that they adorn themselves, and so must not count for much. A more serious objection, and one more calculated to have weight with English ladies, has been started, according to a correspondent of our own, by a Russian professor, M. Lindemann. According to this authority, 76 per cent, of the false hair used for chignons and similar purposes in Russia is infested with a parasite to which he has given the name of gregarine. The gregarinous hair, it is said, is very like other hair in appearance, but on close inspection little dark-brown knots are seen at the free end of the hair, and may even be distinguished by the naked eye. These are gregarines. These parasites have a most ignoble ancestry and habitation, being found in the interior of the pediculus capitis. It is only due to them, however, that these statements should be verified by other observers before we give all the particulars of their natural history. They are not easily destroyed. They resist the effects of drying, and even of boiling Acids, alkalies, ether, and other agents would kill them; but these would be injurious to the hair, and so cannot be used. According to the authority quoted, in the conditions of a ballroom the gregarines "revive, grow, and multiply by dividing into many parts -so called germ-globules; these fly about the ballroom in millions, get inhaled, drop on the refreshments- in fact, enter the interior of people by hundreds of ways, and thus reach their specific gregarian development." We do not answer for the truth of all this natural history; but when the natural history of chignons themselves is considered, it may well be all true. In Russia the hair of them is supplied by the poorer people, especially peasant women of the Mordwines and the Burlakes, near the "When Volga, who do a large trade in it. the Burlake goes out to work in the spring, he perhaps puts a clean shirt on, but he decidedly never takes it off until he returns home in autumn." Verily, as the professor argues, here is a fine chance for parasites We must leave the subject with ladies and naturalists. Half the awful possibilities of (Daily Telegraph, Feb. 20.) WHAT do the fair wearers of chignons think of those deceitful embellishments now, when our quotations from the medical papers have brought out such fresh and terrible revelations as those we published yesterday? gregarines." We had hoped that there might be some mistake about the horrid" Science does go a little too fast occasionally, and it was shocking to believe that those glossy hypocrisies at the back of ladies' heads could be nests of unmentionable animalculæ, bred in the unclean huts of Mongol or Calmuck peasants, and hatching, like eggs in a hydro-incubator, on the warm necks of our ladies. But after the letter of our correspondent, "Investigator," it seems He has not only found these but too true. vile insects on the most fashionable and best prepared chignon that he could procure, but he has discovered how they grow, and how long it takes before-horror of horrors!-they become in their new home, so to speak, "of age," adult pediculi. At first they are microscopic creatures, tiny dots on the extremity of each hair; when heat gradually warms their gelatinous envelope, they increase, get antennæ, feet, organs of all kinds, and start upon their travels. Our correspondent bound some of them upon the neck of a hen, and actually witnessed their complete development, under the influence of the bird's natural warmth of skin. Who will wear a chignon, one week, one day, after this horrible experiment? Away with these abominable nests of foreign horrors, which cannot be killed bad enough if it only came by anything that does not spoil the gloss of the chignon as it often does, from corpses; bad enough if it were only, as it always is, a cheat; but worse than the grave, worse than deceit can make it, when it is a trap for Calmuck — ! Let our ladies hasten to return to their own safe and pleasant tresses for adornment; or "the tangles who will dare to treasure a lock of them, or so much as to think upon, of Neæra's hair?" If nothing can kill what comes over with the chignons, let the chignons die out themselves. -- No. 1193. Fourth Series, No. 54. 13 April, 1867. POETRY: Faith and Light in the Latter Days, 66. On his Ninetieth Birthday, 66. Bound Copies of Vol. 92 (the last volume) are now ready. IMPEACHMENT OF THE PRESIDENT. — In consequence of the talk on this subject, we THE EDUCATION OF DEAF MUTES: Shall it be by Signs or Articulation? By Gardiner Greene Hubbard, of Cambridge, Mass. Boston: A. Williams & Co. FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the Living Age will be punctually forwarded a commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. |