of country, at the rate of forty-three miles a day.  He seems afterwards to have gone as far as the Altai Mountains, on the frontiers of China.  As, however, his principal object was to explore the extreme north-east of Asia, he went down the Lena, and reached Jakutzk on the 16th of October, 1820.  On the Kolyma, where he arrived on the 30th of December, in longitude 164 deg., he met the Russian polar expedition.  From Jakutzk to this place he travelled four hundred miles, without meeting a single human being.  At the fair held at Tchutski, whither he next directed his steps, he received much information respecting the northeast of Asia.  He ascertained the existence of this cape; all doubts, he says, being now solved, not by calculation, but by ocular demonstration.  Its latitude and longitude, are well ascertained:  he places this cape half a degree more to the northward than Baron Wrangel; but it is doubtful whether he himself reached it, and if he did, whether he had the means of fixing its latitude, or whether he depends entirely on the information he received at the fair of Tchutski.  His expressions, in a letter to the President of the Royal Society, are, “No land is considered to exist to the northward of it.  The east side of the Noss is composed of bold and perpendicular cliffs, while the west side exhibits gradual declivities; the whole most sterile, but presenting an awfully magnificent appearance.”  From the fair he seems to have returned to Kolyma, and thence proceeded to Okotsk, a dangerous, difficult, and fatiguing journey of three thousand versts, a great part performed on foot, in seventy days.  From this last place he proceeded to Kamschatka, where it is supposed he was obliged to terminate his investigations, in consequence of an order or intimation from the Russian government not to proceed further.

We must next direct our attention to what has been done since the commencement of the eighteenth century, toward discovering a passage in the north-east of America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

One of the conditions on which the Hudson’s Bay Company obtained their charter, in the year 1670, from Charles II., was, that they should prosecute their discoveries; but so far from doing this, they are accused, and with great appearance of reason, of not only suffering their ardour for discovery to cool, but also of endeavouring to conceal, as much as possible, the true situation and nature of the coast about Hudson’s Bay, partly in order to secure more effectually their monopoly, and partly from the dread they entertained, that if a passage to the Pacific were discovered by this route, government would recal their charter, and grant it to the East India Company.  They were indeed roused, but very ineffectively, from their torpor, by one of their captains intimating, that if they refused to fulfill the terms of their charter, by making discoveries, and extending their trade, he would himself apply to the crown.  In order to silence him, they sent him and another captain out in two vessels, in 1719 or 1720; but they both perished, it is supposed, near Marble Island, without effecting any thing.