xz news we publish this morning, that Dr. Nansen has succeeded in at last accomplishing a task, in the pursuit of which so many lives have been sacrificed, will be received with. interest, and for the time will profitable divert our minds from the contemplation of international bick-brings and the terrors of prospective wars. As far back as the time of King Alfred, and with renewed force since the remarkable explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the frigid terrors of the North have exercised a peculiar fascination over the Nomads of Science. However heroic were the endeavours of the travellers, and whatever the amount of success may have been that rewarded their trials, it cannot but be confessed that there was a sameness about their methods, which had its influence upon the stories they were able to relate. But Dr. Nansen, a Norwegian scientist born in 1861, seems to have been the first to enlist the forces of Nature on his side with good result, 'I'he discovery of some relics of the ill-fated Jeannette expedition on the coast of Greenland, which had drifted from the opposite side of the Polar Sea, suggested to him that by availing oneself of natural causes rather than by opposing them, it might be possible to cross the Arctic Ocean by the unknown current which had transported the relics. By previous study and travels he had shown himself to be an original and Jearned scientist, and when, in 1892, Norway decided upon, another Polat expedition, Dr. Nansen was selected to lead it, In that year he had built a vessel called the From (Onward), rigged as a three-masted schooner, with an engine of 160 horse-power and a. displacement of 800 tons. Her sides were so constructed as to force the ice meeting the vessel underneath her, so that the hull would escape being nipped or "screwed." He left Norway with a crew of twelve men on the 24th of July, 1893, and since the latter part of the following month, when he wrote that he was about to sail into the Kara Sea, we believe no tidings have been received of him..''he details of his journey will be anxiously awaited, and in all probability, instead of satisfying scientific curiosity, will give additional encouragement to explorers to amplify and. investigate his discoveries, Whether these may be of immediate practical value is not the question, but in the belief that the pursuit of all knowledge is for the good of the.race, they will be welcomed, and we trust rewarded, as they deserve.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.