THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 17 



rather follow Ernest Thompson Seton who is so impressed with 

 the grasslands of the North that he makes the expression "The 

 Arctic Prairies" the title of his book describing a journey north. 

 Mecham, one of the most remarkable of arctic travelers and the 

 original explorer of southwestern Melville Island and southern 

 Prince Patrick Island, says in his report, published in the Parlia- 

 mentary Blue Books of Great Britain for the year 1855, that many 

 of the portions of Melville Island which did not happen to be rocky 

 reminded him of English meadows. This was five hundred miles 

 north of the arctic circle and this is the case no matter how far 

 north you go. Northern Greenland is not only the most northerly 

 land so far discovered but the refrigerating effect of the ice in the 

 sea is there greatly accentuated by the chill from the inland ice- 

 cap. Here, descending from the inland ice to the coast, Peary 

 found musk oxen grazing in green and flowered meadows among 

 the song of birds and the hum of bees. That the musk ox is a 

 grass-eating animal and not a lichen-eater, and is the most northerly 

 land animal known, sharing that distinction equally with the cari- 

 bou, shows that grass must be abundant on the most northerly lands. 



We now come to the remarkable adjective "lifeless," so fre- 

 quently applied to the North. What has been already said is an 

 indirect comment on this, but we may develop it further. Look 

 in any work of oceanography, and you will find the statement that 

 in the ocean the amount of animal life per cubic unit of volume 

 does not decrease as you go north from the equator. To this it is 

 of course possible to reply, "Oh, yes, but when we call the arctic 

 lifeless we are not thinking "of the depths of the sea but of the sur- 

 face of the land." If that is the position taken, it differs diamet- 

 rically from that of such a polar authority, as, for instance, Sir 

 Clements Markham, a former president of the Royal Geographical 

 Society of Great Britain, who on page 166 of his "Life of Admiral 

 McClintock" speaks of the "polar ocean without life" in contradis- 

 tinction to the polar islands, which he recognized to be well sup- 

 plied with it. 



The arctic grasslands have caribou in herds of tens of thou- 

 sands and sometimes hundreds of thousands to a single band, with 

 lesser numbers of musk oxen here and there. Wolves that feed 

 on the caribou go singly and in packs of ten or less, and their 

 aggregate numbers on the arctic prairies of the two hemispheres 

 must be well in the tens of thousands. There are the polar foxes, 

 both white and blue, that feed in summer on the unbelievable 

 swarms of lemmings that also form the food of hundreds of thou- 



