Daines Barrington (1727/8-1800) and Mark Beaufoy (1764-1827) became fellows of the Royal Society in 1767 and 1790 respectively. Barrington's contributions to the Philosophical Transactions favoured natural history, but another of his passions was polar exploration and a potential sea route through the Arctic Ocean. Beaufoy, an astronomer and physicist, was notably involved in discerning changes in the earth's magnetic field. Reissued in its 1818 second edition, these papers discuss Arctic exploration and evidence for the theorised open polar sea. Barrington's tracts, originally dating from...