This is a great gain to research.  When in a year’s time we have Captain Scott back safe and sound with all his discoveries and observations on the other route, Amundsen’s results will greatly increase in value, since the conditions will then be illuminated from two sides.  The simultaneous advance towards the Pole from two separate points was precisely the most fortunate thing that could happen for science.  The region investigated becomes so much greater, the discoveries so many more, and the importance of the observations is more than doubled, often multiplied many times.  Take, for instance, the meteorological conditions:  a single series of observations from one spot no doubt has its value, but if we get a simultaneous series from another spot in the same region, the value of both becomes very much greater, because we then have an opportunity of understanding the movements of the atmosphere.  And so with other investigations.  Scott’s expedition will certainly bring back rich and important results in many departments, but the value of his observations will also be enhanced when placed side by side with Amundsen’s.

An important addition to Amundsen’s expedition to the Pole is the sledge journey of Lieutenant Prestrud and his two companions eastward to the unknown King Edward VII.  Land, which Scott discovered in 1902.  It looks rather as if this land was connected with the masses of land and immense mountain-chains that Amundsen found near the Pole.  We see new problems looming up.

But it was not only these journeys over ice-sheets and mountain-ranges that were carried out in masterly fashion.  Our gratitude is also due to Captain Nilsen and his men.  They brought the Fram backwards and forwards, twice each way, through those ice-filled southern waters that many experts even held to be so dangerous that the Fram would not be able to come through them, and on both trips this was done with the speed and punctuality of a ship on her regular route.  The Fram’s builder, the excellent Colin Archer, has reason to be proud of the way in which his “child” has performed her latest task —­ this vessel that has been farthest north and farthest south on our globe.  But Captain Nilsen and the crew of the Fram have done more than this; they have carried out a work of research which in scientific value may be compared with what their comrades have accomplished in the unknown world of ice, although most people will not be able to recognize this.  While Amundsen and his companions were passing the winter in the South, Captain Nilsen, in the Fram, investigated the ocean between South America and Africa.  At no fewer than sixty stations they took a number of temperatures, samples of water, and specimens of the plankton in this little-known region, to a depth of 2,000 fathoms and more.  They thus made the first two sections that have ever been taken of the South Atlantic, and added new regions of the unknown ocean depths to human knowledge.  The Fram’s sections are the longest and most complete that are known in any part of the ocean.