The death of Lady Kennet, on 25 July 1947, has removed one of the earliest and firmest supporters of the Scott Polar Research Institute.

A woman of rare gifts and wide interests, she was at ease in many circles, including those of art and of politics. In the naval and exploration circle, which she entered when she married Captain Scott, she was equally at home and welcomed. The wedding took place when Scott's last expedition, of 1910–13, was being planned, and she at once threw herself into the schemes of her husband, bringing to them a fresh group of supporters and a very original mind.

A knowledge of the positions of the magnetic poles is important for the construction of magnetic charts of the polar areas. Charts giving the isogonals, or lines of equal declination, are needed for the purpose of air navigation over the polar regions, which is likely to become of increasing importance. The isogonals have a particularly complicated shape in the polar regions, because both the geographical pole and the magnetic pole are points of singularity, through which all the isogonals necessarily pass.

By the Treaty of Paris of 1763, Canada was ceded by France to the United Kingdom, and what is to-day known as Newfoundland-Labrador first acquired a separate and political importance. Following the conclusion of the Treaty, the administration of the territory was entrusted to the newly appointed Governor of Newfoundland, and the loosely worded Commission which went with the change was in part responsible for the fact that in the succeeding 100 years Labrador was “tossed back and forth like a shuttlecock between the two rival claimants”, Canada and Newfoundland.

Writing as long ago as 1922, Dr Vilhjalmur Stefansson commented: “There are few nowadays who do not agree that the world is round, but there are almost equally few who apply the principle of the world's roundness consistently when they think about going from place to place.” Twenty-three years later, he returned to the same question, with a statement that, far from sounding prophetic, was all too obvious. “If you shoot robot bombs (as Heaven preserve us from ever doing), they will cross the Arctic on their way from London to Seattle, from Peiping to New York, from San Francisco to. Moscow. That is the way the bombers will fly, if we ever permit them to.”

In the following notes an attempt has been made to summarise the main facts which anyone dealing with the literature and cartography of Svalbard would require to know in order to give a correct rendering of the place-names and to understand the changes in form which have taken place. The writer wishes to express his grateful thanks to Professor A. Sommerfelt for much assistance in connection with the linguistic aspects of the subject, and to Dr Anders K. Orvin, of the Norsk Polarinstitutt, Oslo, who kindly checked the whole manuscript.

Cryolite is a rare mineral which is only mined in Greenland and is one of the most important assets in- Greenland economy. It is grey-white and translucent, almost like ice when wet, a fluoride of sodium and aluminium with the chemical formula Na3AlF6. The only commercial source is at Ivigtut in south-west Greenland, whilst the only two other known occurrences—at Pikes Peak, Colorado, and Miass in the Urals—are both small and impure. Lately, however, the Russians have claimed that the geological structure of Kol'ski Poluostrov (Kola Peninsula) would indicate the likelihood of cryolite being found there, and there are also reports of a mine in active production in East Siberia on the Manchurian border.

Polar explorers are necessarily men of many parts, but even among that fraternity Admiral Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield seems to have commanded a particularly wide range of talents. Apart from his seamanship, he possessed artistic and mechanical accomplishments. He was the inventor of the hydraulic steering gear and of the “Inglefield anchor”; he wrote several pamphlets on naval subjects including one on terrestrial magnetism; the distinction of his paintings, of which several were exhibited at a naval exhibition at Chelsea in 1891 and some at the Royal Academy, is evident from the water-colour of the yacht Isabel in Arctic setting reproduced with this article. He was a gardener, a collector of old glass, and a graceful after-dinner speaker.