“The exact weight of the turnip crop this season is, on raw bog, drained, limed, and cropped this year for the first time, 24 tons per acre; manure, seaweed. On land ploughed but not cropped, last year 23½ tons; mixed mineral manure. On land from which a crop of oats had previously been taken, 29 tons; manure, farmyard, with 3 cwt. per acre mineral manure.
“Last year my excellent steward, Mr. MacAlister, visited the Duke of Sutherland’s reclamations in Scotland, and was kindly and hospitably received. He found the land and the procedure adopted almost identical, with the conviction that oxen and horses will suit us better at the present time than steam culture, chiefly on the score of economy. He also visited the Bridgewater Estate at Chat Moss, near Manchester, where so much has been done to bring the deep peat into cultivation, and he found the system that has been followed there for so many years to be like that described above, marl, however, being used in the place of lime.”
At the time of my visit to Kylemore the hay crops were down and partly carried on the reclaimed bog-land above described. The contrast of its luxuriance with the dark and dreary desolation of the many estates I had seen during three summers’ wanderings through Ireland added further proof of the infamy of the majority of Irish landlords, by showing what Ireland would have been had they done their duty.
AERIAL EXPLORATION OF THE ARCTIC REGIONS.
On our own hemisphere, and separated from our own coasts by only a few days’ journey on our own element, there remains a blank circle of unexplored country above 800 miles in diameter. We have tried to cross it, and have not succeeded. Nothing further need be said in reply to those who ask, “Why should we start another Arctic Expedition?”
The records of previous attempts to penetrate this area of geographical mystery prove the existence of a formidable barrier of mountainous land, fringed by fjords or inlets, like those of Norway, some of which may be open, though much contracted northward, like the Vestfjord that lies between the Lofoden Islands and the mainland of Scandinavia. The majority evidently run inland like the ordinary Norwegian fjords or the Scotch firths, and terminate in land valleys that continue upwards to fjeld regions, or elevated humpy land which acts as a condenser to the vapor-laden air continually flowing towards the Pole from the warmer regions of the earth, and returning in lower streams when cooled. The vast quantities of water thus condensed fall upon these hills and table lands as snow crystals. What becomes of this everlasting deposit?
Unlike the water that rains on temperate hill-sides, it cannot all flow down to the sea as torrents and liquid rivers, but it does come down nevertheless, or long ere this it would have reached the highest clouds. It descends mainly as glaciers, which creep down slowly, but steadily and irresistibly, filling up the valleys on their way; and stretching outwards into the fjords and channels, which they block up with their cleft and chasmed crystalline angular masses that still creep outward to the sea until they float, and break off or “calve” as mountainous icebergs and smaller masses of ice.
These accumulations of ice thus formed on land constitute the chief obstructions that bar the channels and inlets fringing the unknown Polar area. The glacier fragments above described are cemented together in the winter time by the freezing of the water between them. An open frozen sea, pure and simple, instead of forming a barrier to arctic exploration, would supply a most desirable highway. It must not be supposed that, because the liquid ocean is ruffled by ripples, waves, and billows, a frozen sea would have a similar surface. The freezing of such a surface could only start at the calmest intervals, and the ice would shield the water from the action of the wave-making wind, and such a sea would become a charming skating rink, like the Gulf of Bothnia, the Swedish and Norwegian lakes, and certain fjords, which, in the winter time, become natural ice-paved highways, offering incomparable facilities for rapid locomotion. In spite of the darkness and the cold, winter is the traveling season in Sweden and Lapland. The distance that can be made in a given time in summer with a wheeled vehicle on well-made post roads can be covered in half the time in a pulk or reindeer sledge drawn over the frozen lakes. From Spitzbergen to the Pole would be an easy run of five or six days if nothing but a simply frozen sea stood between them.
This primary physical fact, that arctic navigators have not been stopped by a merely frozen sea, but by a combination of glacier fragments with the frozen water of bays, and creeks, and fjords, should be better understood than it is at present; for when it is understood, the popular and fallacious notion that the difficulties of arctic progress are merely dependent on latitude, and must therefore increase with latitude, explodes.