Narrative of a Voyage to the Polar Sea during 1875 - C,
in H.M.'s Ships Alert' and Discovery.' By Captain Sir G. S. Nares. (Sampson Low and Co.)—Sir George Nares is not a brilliant writer, and few subjects are more monotonous or less interesting to the general reader than the history of Arctic expeditions, unless some great achievements have attended them. The newspapers forestall by the letters of correspondents, and the reports of the speeches made by the explorers on their return, at public dinners and scientific meetings, all that note-books and journals are afterwards to reveal in fuller, and generally wearisome detail. These volumes are heavy specimens of a heavy kind of literature, but they are calculated to fulfil the purpose of their writer, who intends them "for the information of future Arctic explorers," whom he desires especially to impress with his own firm conviction that the North Pole is unattainable by the Smith-Sound route.
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