Of the more southerly portion of the A. 0., the only section that is tolerably well known to a distance from the continent is that which washes the n.e. of America. It contains, under the collective name of polar archipelago, these islands, or parts of islands: Banks land, Prince Albert land, Wollaston land, Victoria land, Prince Patrick island, Princess Royal islands, Melville island, Cornwallis island, north Devon, Grinnell land, north Lincoln, and various others. Off the coast of the old world, again, are Spitz bergen, Nova Zembla, Now Siberia, Wrangel land. King Charles land, etc. The latest discovery, made by Weyprecht and Payer in 1873, is that of Franz-Joseph land, an exten sive and mountainous tract, lying about 200 m. due n. of Nova Zembla. Its s. coast is in about 80 n. lat., and it was seen to extend as far n. as 83°, occupying at least 15° of longitude. The chief straits are Lancaster sound, Barrow's strait, Smith's sound, strait of the Fury and Freda, Wellington channel, Banks strait, etc. The chief rivers, all of them on the mainland, are the Obi, the Yenesei, and the Lena, of the first class; the Mackenzie, the Yana, the Indigirka, and the Kolyma, of the second; and many others of the third.
The principal production of the A. 0. has been the whale. The whale-fisheries on the w. coast of Spitzbergcn, and on both sides of •reenland, scarcely need to mentioned. But it may not be generally known, that, according to official returns as quoted by admiral Beechy, the Americans had, in two years, drawn more than 8,000,000 of dollars, or upwards of £1,600,000 sterling, from the whale-fishery of Behring strait alone.
On the side of east Siberia, however, the A. O. produces a more remarkable article of traffic. Here are found, in the greatest abundance, the bones of the mammoth. Spring
after spring, the alluvial banks of the lakes and rivers, crumbling under the thaw, give up, as it were, their dead; while the islands lying of the Yana, and even the depths of the sea itself, literally teem with these mysterious memorials of antiquity.
The American half of the A. O., if it cannot boast of fossil ivory, presents something still more difficult perhaps to be explained. In lat. 74° 25', and lat. 76' 15' respect ively, capt. M'Clure and It. Mecham discovered large deposits of trees, apparently indigenous, of considerable size. Writing of Banks' island, M'Clure has the following passage: "From the summit of these hills, which arc 300 feet high, to their base, abun dance of wood is to be found, and in many places layers of trees are visible, some pro truding 12 or 14 ft., and so firm that several people may jump on them without their breaking: the largest trunk yet found measured 1 ft. 7 in. in diameter"--equivalent in girth to about b ft. Again, "I entered a ravine some miles inland, and found the n. side of it, for a depth of 40 ft., composed of one mass of wood. Some of it was petri fied, the remainder very rotten, and worthless even for burning." Writing of Prince Patrick island, Mecham has the following passage: " Discovereeburied in the e. bank of the ravine, and protruding about 8 ft., a tree of considerable size. During the after noon I found several others of a similar kind : circumference of first and second tree seen, 3 ft.; of another, 2 ft. 10 in. Front the perfect state of the bark, and the dis tance of the trees from the sea, there can be buy little doubt that they grew originally in this country."