uese to India, and Japan; and in case our
expedition succeeds in reaching the Suez Canal, after having
circumnavigated Asia, there will meet us there a splendid work,
which, more than any other, reminds us, that what to-day is declared
by experts to be impossible, is often carried into execution
to-morrow.

I am also fully convinced that it is not only possible to sail along
the north coast of Asia, provided circumstances are not too
unfavourable, but that such an enterprise will be of incalculable
practical importance, by no means directly, as opening a new
commercial route, but indirectly, by the impression which would
thereby be communicated of the practical utility of a communication
by sea between the ports of North Scandinavia and the Obi and
Yenisej, on the one hand, and between the Pacific Ocean and the Lena
on the other.

Should the expedition, contrary to expectation, not succeed in
carrying out the programme which has been arranged in its entirety,
it ought not to be looked upon as having failed. In such a case the
expedition will remain for a considerable time at places on the
north coast of Siberia, suitable for scientific research. Every mile
beyond the mouth of the Yenisej is a step forward to a complete
knowledge of our globe--an object which sometime or other must be
attained, and towards which it is a point of honour for every
civilised nation to contribute in its proportion.

Men of science will have an opportunity, in these hitherto unvisited
waters, of answering a number of questions regarding the former and
present state of the Polar countries, of which more than one is of
sufficient weight and importance to lead to such an expedition as
the present. I may be permitted here to refer to only a few of
these.

If we except that part of the Kara Sea which has been surveyed by
the two last Swedish expeditions, we have for the present no
knowledge of the vegetable and animal life in the sea which washes
the north coast of Siberia. Quite certainly we shall here, in
opposition to what has been hitherto supposed, meet with the same
abundance of animals and plants as in the sea round Spitzbergen. In
the Siberian Polar sea, the animal and vegetable types, so far as we
can judge beforehand, exclusively consist of survivals from the
glacial period, which next preceded the present, which is not the
case in the Polar Sea, where the Gulf Stream distributes its waters,
and whither it thus carries types from