to this land of almost perpetual winter, where the mercury freezes during
ten months in the year, and where the sun remains four months beneath the
horizon, they subsequently gave the appropriate and vernacular name of
Spitzbergen. Combats with the sole denizens of these hideous abodes,
the polar bears, on the floating ice, on the water, or on land, were
constantly occurring, and were the only events to disturb the monotony of
that perpetual icy sunshine, where no night came to relieve the almost
maddening glare. They rowed up a wide inlet on the western coast, and
came upon great numbers of wild-geese sitting on their eggs. They proved
to be the same geese that were in the habit of visiting Holland in vast
flocks every summer, and it had never before been discovered where they
laid and hatched their eggs. "Therefore," says the diarist of the
expedition, "some voyagers have not scrupled to state that the eggs grow
on trees in Scotland, and that such of the fruits of those trees as fall
into the water become goslings, while those which drop on the ground
burst in pieces and come to nothing. We now see that quite the contrary
is the case," continues De Veer, with perfect seriousness, "nor is it to
be wondered at, for nobody has ever been until now where those birds lay
their eggs. No man, so far as known, ever reached the latitude of eighty
degrees before. This land was hitherto unknown."

The scientific results of this ever-memorable voyage might be deemed
sufficiently meagre were the fact that the eggs of wild geese did not
grow on trees its only recorded discovery. But the investigations made
into the dread mysteries of the north, and the actual problems solved,
were many, while the simplicity of the narrator marks the infantine
character of the epoch in regard to natural history. When so illustrious
a mind as Grotius was inclined to believe in a race of arctic men whose
heads grew beneath their shoulders; the ingenuous mariner of Amsterdam
may be forgiven for his earnestness in combating the popular theory