Franz Boas

“ The exchange of water between the Arctic and the Equatorial Ocean must be affected through this strait, as the narrow and shallow Bering Strait cannot have any influence on this system of currents. No warm current forms there a ‘thermometrical gateway’ to the pole. The surplus of water annually added to the arctic sea must take its way through the strait between American and Europe. ”

“ Melville’s meteorology, I confess that I cannot undertake to refute his theory at this place, as I should have to fall back on the elements of this science and those of physics. “And as they [the air-currents] do follow the earth’s surface, they take their direction toward the pole, following the spherical surface of the earth until they reach the shoulders of the ellipsoid, where the flattening of the earth commences (!) ”

“ His view about the ice-cap will be seen from the following quotations (l. c., p. 475) : “After crossing the eighty-fifth degree of latitude, the traveller will come to that immovable ice-cap which will in all probability prove to be a palaeocrystic sea of ice and snow. We should have a clear, unbroken surface to travel upon, subject, of course, to fissures and shrinkage cracks.” P. 476, he says, “The countless million square miles of ice annually expelled from the Arctic OCean alone prove the fallacy of a ‘palaeocrystic sea of ice;’” p. ”