ARCTIC RESOURCES 221 



Stomachs being rare. This rareness of fish may have been due either 

 to their scarcity, or, as I beheve, to the fact that the shrimps were 

 easier to catch and equally agreeable to the seals, who were always 

 in as good condition as any seals; in fact, so far as we could judge 

 from their buoyancy in water, they are inclined to be fatter the 

 farther from land you go and the farther they are within the area 

 formerly said to be "devoid of animal life." 



When an extensive field of ice, such as that in which the Fram 

 was embedded, is floating over a deep ocean far from land, the water 

 immediately under is generally moving with it, although not always 

 at the same speed, so that a suspended net would have little sweeping 

 motion with reference to floating things and could not be expected to 

 catch many even if there were many. This should, I believe, have 

 more weight than Nansen gives it in explaining how little plankton he 

 captured. Fish, however, swim about, and an ordinary net lowered 

 to the right depth would seem, at first blush, to have a chance to 

 catch them. But I know from actual experience that many varieties 

 of fish are caught in considerable numbers by a given net in the dark 

 of night that cannot be caught in a similar net during daylight, even 

 under the heaviest snow-covered winter ice. Since Nansen did much 

 of his experimenting with nets during the perpetual light of spring, or 

 else lowered and raised them during one period of daylight, I feel his 

 negative conclusions are again considerably weakened. 



Even so, Nansen did observe more animal life than he apparently 

 expected and, more strikingly, a greater variety than he had expected. 

 He was accordingly finding less confirmation than he expected both 

 of decreasing quantity and decreasing variety in going from warmer 

 to colder waters. 



Of course, the great variety were caught because many kinds of 

 animals were present; but may it not be that the principal explanation 

 of why small quantities of each were caught lay in methods that were 

 inadequate, for the reasons above given, and others? I for one am 

 inclined to believe that had there been some way of accurately gaug- 

 ing the amount of life per cubic unit, this would have surprised Nansen 

 as much as did the variety. In any case his observation of a little life 

 contradicted the old theory of the total absence of life. 



Marine Deserts in the Arctic Sea 



There is great difiiculty in stating a novel view without overstating 

 it, or at least creating too strong an impression in the reader's mind. 

 I realized this early and therefore in 191 2 and 191 3, when I was gather- 

 ing money and men (in part) to test out the view that skillful hunters 

 could live indefinitely anywhere on the floating ocean ice, I found 

 people either flatly incredulous or, if converted, then too sanguine 

 and expecting to find a game paradise everywhere. 



