CLIMATE IN SOME OF ITS RELATIONS TO MAN 267 



polar zones a " monotony of cold " replaces the " monotony of heat " 

 of the tropics, and instead of the spur of the temperate zone seasons 

 there is the depressing, long, polar night. There is a minimum of life. 

 Plants are few and lowly. Land animals which depend upon plant 

 food must therefore likewise be few in number. Farming and cattle 

 raising cease. The reindeer, which manages to find sufficient food in 

 the lowly Arctic vegetation, is the mainstay of the Arctic natives. But 

 the reindeer must wander far and wide in search of their moss. And 

 many reindeer are needed to provide sustenance for one man. Popu- 

 lation is small, and scattered. There are no permanent settlements at 

 all within the Antarctic Circle. In the Arctic, human settlements are 

 fairly well scattered over a considerable range near the margins of the 

 zone, but with increasing latitude man is more and more rarely seen, 

 and finally he disappears altogether. There will never be permanent 

 settlements at the poles. 



Life is hard. Man seeks his food by the chase on land, but chiefly 

 in the sea. Hardly one tenth of Greenland's population could live 

 there without food from the sea. It has been well said that, with every 

 degree of higher latitude, man is forced more and more to obtain his 

 food from the sea. Gales, snow and cold, cause many deaths on land, 

 and also at sea. It has been estimated that about one twenty-fifth of 

 the population of Iceland perishes through being lost in snowstorms, 

 by freezing or by drowning. The polar limit of permanent human 

 settlements is believed by Bessels to be fixed, not by the decreasing 

 temperature, but by the increase in the length of the night, which 

 shortens the time during which man can lay up food, by hunting and 

 fishing, to last him through the polar night. 



Culture in the Polar Zones. — Under such adverse conditions it is 

 not hard to see that progress towards a higher culture is not a reason- 

 able expectation. There is little time in which man may seek to de- 

 velop and satisfy his higher needs. Much truth is contained in Guyot's 

 somewhat picturesque statement: 



The man of the polar zones is the beggar overwhelmed with suffering, who, 

 too happy if he but gain his daily bread, has no leisure to think of anything 

 more exalted. 



A sparse population, not far advanced in culture or in social re- 

 lations, is inevitable under polar conditions of climate. 



Deserts of Sand and Deserts of Snow. — There is a singular simi- 

 larity, in their relation to man, of the deserts of sand, near the equator, 

 and the frozen deserts of snow, near the pole, to which I have referred. 

 The relations are interesting, for they illustrate very clearly how simi- 

 lar climatic controls, acting through plant and animal life, affect the 

 life of man in the same large way. I can not select a better example 

 for closing my discussion this afternoon. 



