ARCTIC RESOURCES 219 



recent three-volume addition to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.^ 

 Evidently he has either not gone into the evidence which converted 

 Admiral Peary or else that evidence has seemed to him either unsound 

 or insufficient. 



Nansen's is no roundabout argument based on complicated reason- 

 ing, for he made direct attempts to determine and measure the 

 presence and abundance of undersea life on the long drift of the Fram. 

 Moreover, he is a scientist of the highest standing in general and a 

 leader of oceanography in particular. 



It seems to me that Nansen attached too much importance to 

 his failure to observe much animal life during the years when the 

 Fram was drifting embedded in the ice. I gather that he took the 

 fewness of animals on the entire strip marked out on the map by his 

 line of drift to mean approximately the same as if he had sailed along 

 that line in a free ocean. He does point out here and there that the 

 water in many cases drifted with the ice, but he is nevertheless com- 

 monly assumed to have studied an ocean surface the area of which is 

 the product of the length of drift (disregarding back tracks), multiplied 

 by the width of the area he could superficially observe either from 

 his masthead or by walking from the ship at right angles to the course. 

 However, this is really not much more true than if we were to assume — 

 if such a thing were possible — that a person has a knowledge of a 

 belt 5 miles wide and 19,000 miles long just because he had hovered 

 in an airplane not far above the ground near Springfield, Illinois, for 

 twenty-four hours and observed a prairie meticulously while the earth 

 revolved underneath him. 



s Fridtjof Nansen: The Oceanography of the North Polar Basin, The Norwegian North Polar 

 Expedition, 1893-1896: Scientific Results, Vol. 3, Memoir No. 9, Christiania, etc., 1902; reference in 

 section "The Biological Conditions of the North Polar Basin, " pp. 422-427. 



Section on " Biological Problems, " in article "Polar Exploration " Encyclopaedia Britannica; The 

 Three New Supplementary Volumes Constituting with the Volumes of the Later Standard Edition the 

 Thirteenth Edition, 3 vols., London and New York, 1926; reference in Vol. 3, p. 178. This reference 

 reads: 



"The North Polar Sea, covered in its interior by an almost continuous layer of thick ice, is ex- 

 tremely poor in plant as well as animal life. The sunlight is absorbed by the thick ice, and extremely 

 little light penetrates to the water underneath. Hardly any plant life can therefore be developed in 

 this water; there is only just a little — chiefly in the water lanes between the floes in the summer; and 

 without plant life, no animal life. The interior, continuously ice-covered North Polar Sea may therefore 

 be considered as a desert in the ocean, where the Fram expedition (i 893-1 896) 'found comparatively 

 many species of small crustaceans, but the fauna was so extremely poor in number of specimens that 

 the tow-nets might hang out for several days and, although we drifted along at a good speed there was 

 extremely little in them when we hauled them up.' These conditions have a peculiar effect. The 

 substances in the sea water generally used to sustain the plant and animal life of the sea are thus used 

 only to an extremely small extent in the ice-covered North Polar Sea, and the result obviously is that 

 these substances are to a great extent stored in the sea water of that region. But as soon as this water 

 with these accumulated riches is freed of the ice, near the outskirts of the Polar Sea, and is exposed to 

 the sunlight in the spring and summer, an unusually rich plant and animal life (plankton) is developed 

 and flourishes. It would certainly be of great importance for the understanding of the biology of the 

 ocean in general to study in detail the biological conditions in the North Polar Regions. " 



Another statement will be found in the section "Organic Life " at the end of Dr. Nansen's paper in 

 the present volume. 



On this general topic see also A. H. Clark: The Biological Relationships of the Land, the Sea, and 

 Man, Science, March 11, 1927, pp. 241-245; especially pp. 243-244. — Edit. Note. 



