On June 17th, 1896, the tercentenary of the discovery of Spitsbergen by Barentz, we first sighted the western coast of the great island, the unknown interior of which Sir Martin Conway's expedition had been organized to explore. The sea was strewn with floes, which barred direct approach to the shore, and the incidents of the passage through the ice helped us to realize that we were 13° north of the Arctic Circle, far within the area which, according to a once popular theory, was formerly buried beneath a massive cap of ice. But the first near view of the land was calculated to destroy whatever faith we might have had in the former existence of a north polar ice-cap. For the sharp, serrated ridges of Mount Starashchin (see Pl. XIX, fig. 2) and Dodman Den, which guard the entrance to Ice Fiord, indicate that Western Spitsbergen has not at any recent time been wholly submerged beneath an ice-cap. Confluent series of glaciers occur in Spitsbergen at the present day, and form the so-called ‘inland ice-sheets.’ One such can be seen to the north of Ice Fiord, rising gradually from the shore to the sky-line; while on the plateau south of the fiord are smaller, disconnected glaciers. Hence, during the passage up Ice Fiord, between the great ice-sheet to the north and the scattered glaciers to the south, through the ice-floes among which the steamer carefully threaded its way, and past the huge piles of ice heaped along the shore, we