372 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 2 8 



ments affects, as I have tried to show, the future food production 

 of vast areas which at present enter little into the economic life of 

 the crowded populations of food-importing communities. 



There are plenty of isolated cases to illustrate the healthiness of 

 polar climates and how a man can thrive in the Arctic for a year or 

 several years. But it is unsafe to found faith in polar colonization 

 on such cases. First, they are almost entirely cases of men, and 

 secondly of men in the prime of youth and of strong physique and 

 mentality at the outset. Witness the trappers of the Hudson's Bay 

 Co., the fur traders of Siberia, or the adventurers in the Klondyke 

 and Yukon gold fields. It has even been argued that because a 

 negro accompanied Peary to the pole there is no reason why peoples 

 of the Tropics should not colonize the Arctic ! 



Successful colonization entails not merely the maintenance of 

 health and vigor during a shorter or longer stay in the new en- 

 vironment; it demands that race transference can take place and 

 that the transferred population can thrive with undiminished fer- 

 tility from generation to generation without the infusion of new 

 blood from the mother country. From this point of view the health 

 and energy of women and children i,s the important consideration. 



The Danes in Greenland are the nearest modern approach to this 

 state of affairs, but though the Danish families thrive during their 

 stay in the north they do not regard Greenland as a permanent 

 home; they are exiles counting the years until they can return to 

 Denmark. At certain of the large mining camps in Spitsbergen 

 there are Norwegian families of several years' uninterrupted resi- 

 dence with bright, healthy children born and reared in the far 

 north. 



There are, unfortunately, no data bearing on climatic energy in 

 polar regions such as E. Huntington has collected for the United 

 States and .some other countries. But if his conclusions are true, 

 that a low mean daily temperature is more conducive to high mental 

 energy than a high or even moderate one, then we can be sur^ that 

 the Arctic colonists will not at least suffer intellectual degeneration. 

 On the other hand, those of us who have experienced the extraordi- 

 nary physical energy which is one of the joys of life in polar cli- 

 mates must be a little skeptical of Huntington's further conclusion 

 that a mean daily temperature of about 64° is the optimum for 

 physical activity. That figure would appear to be too high, but of 

 course it represents a value that is extraordinarily difficult to 

 measure. 



The only example of real Arctic colonization that exists is that 

 of the old Norse colonies in southwestern Greenland founded in the 

 tenth century. At their height the two colonies must have con- 

 tained between 2,000 and 3,000 people, men, women, and children 



