374 ANNUAL EEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1928 



will have some say. Those suited will remain; others will move 

 away or perish. But the colonists will not be cut off from the world ; 

 they will be in close touch with it. New blood will continually flow 

 in their veins, so that the unchecked course of natural selection 

 which operated in the old isolated Norse colonies and killed out the 

 more nervous and imaginative type, a type that is least adapted to 

 the Arctic, will not have free play. There is no reason why the race 

 should become impoverished by the elimination of its most progressive 

 element. Even though a diet solely of meat has proved wdiolesome 

 enough in the case of Eskimo and some explorers, it will not be nec- 

 essary for the Arctic colonists to subsist on it entirely; transport 

 facilities will bring every variety of food to their doors. If the 

 Norsemen suffered from insufficiency of certain ingredients in their 

 diet, a similar fate will not be the lot of the colonists of the future. 

 If they died out by lack of new blood and continual inbreeding, the 

 Arctic settlers of the future will be able to avoid that disaster. 



Such is the legitimate forecast, as I see it, of the outer rim of the 

 Arctic of the future with its prosperous, though scattered, colonists 

 of pastoral interests and its fur farms here and there supplying high- 

 priced Arctic furs in limited numbers. But the settlement must wait 

 until the pressure of population on the world's resources is even 

 greater than it is to-day. The remoter parts, those without rich 

 tundra and the ice-covered seas and lands must remain deserts visited 

 only by roving hunters and occasional explorers. In short, I see a 

 shrinking of the Arctic wildernesses, but never their disappearance. 

 I can not take as glowing a view of Arctic settlement as Stefansson 

 can or visualize the same attraction to population which he forecasts, 

 iind I am sceptical of the value of Arctic lands as stations on the air 

 routes of the future. But even if he has overstated his case, his 

 long-sighted views have done something to dispel current miscon- 

 ceptions and reduce the area of polar wastes. 



Of the possibilities of Arctic mining, little need be said. The sub- 

 ject is not purely a geographical one. Where minerals of value occur 

 they will sooner or later be mined, like the cryolite of Greenland, the 

 copper of Arctic Canada, the coal and gypsum of Spitsbergen. Geo- 

 graphical considerations undoubtedly affect the issue, but in the main 

 it is an economic problem. Difficulties of climate can nearly always 

 be overcome, and transport can generally be arranged if the mineral 

 will pay the cost. As coal increases in price, as it promises to do, the 

 Spitsbergen coal mines will pay well, and if gypsum finds new uses 

 and higher values the vast deposits of Spitsbergen will be mined on 

 a great scale. Similar considerations apply to Arctic copper. But 

 the Arctic lands as a whole, as far as we know, are not rich in mineral 

 wealth. The only one that will eventually have a large mining popu- 



