366 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 192 8 



culture and their race languish. A century ago the Eskimo had 

 struck a balance between numbers and resources. They were per- 

 fectly attuned to their environment even if their area of settlement 

 oscillated a little on the confines where game was liable to fail as 

 numbers increased. Then the introduction by Europeans of more 

 effective weapons upset the balance. So nicely adjusted was their 

 equilibrium that the looting of iron from McClure's abandoned 

 ship, Investigator^ was probably the cause of the virtual extermina- 

 tion of the musk ox on Banks Island and its consequent abandon- 

 ment by the Eskimo. The exhaustion of game brought the Alaskan 

 Eskimo to the verge of starvation a few years ago, and if the United 

 States Government had not intervened might have wiped out that 

 branch of the race. 



The resources of the Arctic are not, however, limited to hunting, 

 even if we include with hunting the breeding of fur-bearing ani- 

 mals. Outside Greenland, with its ice sheet covering 94 per cent 

 of the island, a comparatively small area of Arctic lands at present 

 bears permanent ice. The Canadian Arctic islands are free except 

 small ice sheets in the east, in parts of Ellesmere and Baffin Islands ; 

 the Eurasian Islands have more, though there are large free areas 

 in Spitsbergen and the south island of Novaya Zemlya, while the 

 whole of the mainland areas of Siberia, Alaska, and Canada, which 

 can by any stretch of meaning be called Arctic, are free from per- 

 manent ice. Beyond the northern limit of trees there may be said, 

 at a rough estimate, to be about 5,000,000 square miles of ice-free 

 land, or considerably more than the total area of the United States. 

 Most of this is covered with some kind of tundra. The mainland and 

 some of the island areas have a close covering which in favored 

 places may attain a luxuriance and vigor of growth which has 

 little relation to latitude and contradicts all preconceived notions of 

 Arctic productivity. Thus western Ellesmere Island and north- 

 western Greenland are noted for their vegetation. In other places 

 the plant covering is open, and on some of the islands there are 

 areas which are practically desert and bear only a few mosses, 

 lichens, and scattered plants. 



These tundras are the natural grazing grounds of caribou, rein- 

 deer, and musk ox. The musk ox go farthest north, being found 

 even in Ellesmere Island and northern and eastern Greenland, and 

 they are confined to the American Arctic, Neither animal — for of 

 the three caribou and reindeer are essentially the same — leaves the 

 Arctic in winter. They are natives of the north and do not suffer 

 from the winter cold and light snow. Their only enemy besides man 

 is the Arctic wolf. It preys successfully on the reindeer and is less 

 likely to attack the musk ox, which not only can fight the wolf with 



