The Purchase of the North Pole

“And so, Mr. Maston, you consider that a woman can do nothing for the advance of the mathematical or experimental sciences?”

“To my extreme regret, Mrs. Scorbitt,” said J. T. Maston, “I am obliged to say so. That there have been many remarkable female mathematicians, especially in Russia, I willingly admit; but with her cerebral conformation it is not in a woman to become an Archimedes or a Newton.”

“Then, Mr. Maston, allow me to protest in the name of my sex—”

“Sex all the more charming, Mrs. Scorbitt, from its never having taken to transcendental studies!”

“According to you, Mr. Maston, if a woman had seen an apple fall she would never have been able to discover the laws of universal gravitation as did the illustrious Englishman at the close of the seventeenth century!”

“In seeing an apple fall, Mrs. Scorbitt, a woman would have only one idea—to eat it, after the example of our mother Eve.”

“You deny us all aptitude for the higher speculations—”

“All aptitude? No, Mrs. Scorbitt. But I would ask you to remember that since there have been people on this earth, and women consequently, there has never been discovered a feminine brain to which we owe a discovery in the domain of science analogous to the discoveries of Aristotle, Euclid, Kepler, or Laplace.”

“Is that a reason? Is it inevitable that the future should be as the past?”

“Hum! That which has not happened for thousands of years is not likely to happen.”

“Then we must resign ourselves to our fate, Mr. Maston. And as we are indeed good—”

“And how good!” interrupted J. T. Maston, with all the amiable gallantry of which a philosopher crammed with x was capable.

Mrs. Scorbitt was quite ready to be convinced.

“Well, Mr. Maston,” she said, “each to his lot in this world. Remain the extraordinary mathematician that you are. Give yourself entirely to the problems of that immense enterprise to which you and your friends have devoted their lives! I will remain the good woman I ought to be, and assist you with the means.”

“For which you will have our eternal gratitude,” said J. T. Maston.

Mrs. Scorbitt blushed deliciously, for she felt, if not for philosophers in general, at least for J. T. Maston, a truly strange sympathy. Is not a woman’s heart unfathomable?

An immense enterprise it was which this wealthy American widow had resolved to support with large sums of money. The object of its promoters was as follows:—

The Arctic territories, properly so called, according to the highest geographical authorities, are bounded by the seventy-eighth parallel, and extend over fourteen hundred thousand square miles, while the seas extend over seven hundred thousand.

Within this parallel have intrepid modern discoverers advanced nearly as far as the eighty-fourth degree of latitude, revealing many a coast hidden beyond the lofty chain of icebergs, giving names to capes, promontories, gulfs, and bays of these vast Arctic highlands. But beyond this eighty-fourth parallel is a mystery, the unrealizable desideratum of geographers. No one yet knows if land or sea lies hid in that space of six degrees, that impassable barrier of Polar ice.

In this year, 189—, the United States Government had unexpectedly proposed to put up to auction the circumpolar regions then remaining undiscovered, having been urged to this extraordinary step by an American society which had been formed to obtain a concession of the apparently useless tract.