E.— GEOGRAPHY. 89 



furs, a control from which there is no escape. Under wise game laws 

 the Arctic lands and seas may produce a steady crop of furs, but the new 

 form of exploitation will be rather an aspect of stock-raising than of 

 hunting. Even the hunting of sea mammals will suffer eclipse as the 

 ■civilisation of machines advances. The whaler has now deserted most 

 Arctic seas, the sealers are fewer and the walrus hunter has nearly 

 exterminated his prey. The addition of motor power to sloops has 

 enabled the Arctic hunter to extend his area of operations by penetrating 

 the pack farther than sail would admit. Arctic animal life has suffered 

 as a result, as for instance the inroads on Spitsbergen reindeer in their 

 relatively safe sanctuaries on the north and east. 



Of all Arctic animals, at least of those that have a commercial value 

 at present, the polar bear will endure longest, not because he is least desired, 

 but because he is a sea mammal who lives in the inner fastnesses of the 

 polar pack and can be hunted only on its fringes. 



Exhaustion of game leads to a decrease in the number of hunters. 

 So far as this decrease concerns temporary hunters from the south, it may 

 lead to a slow revival in resources ; but as regards the permanent 

 inhabitants of Arctic America, the Eskimo, it has serious effects. Their 

 standard of living is reduced, want appears, and their culture and their 

 race languish. A century ago the Eskimo had struck a balance between 

 numbers and resources. They were perfectly attuned to their environ- 

 ment even if their area of settlement oscillated a little on the confines 

 where game was liable to fail as numbers increased. Then the introduction 

 by Europeans of more effective weapons upset the balance. So nicely 

 adjusted was their equilibrium that the looting of iron from McClure's 

 abandoned ship, Investigator, was probably the cause of the virtual 

 extermination of musk-ox on Banks Island and its consequent abandon- 

 ment by the Eskimo. The exhaustion of game brought the Alaskan 

 Eskimo to the verge of starvation a few years ago, and if the United 

 States Government had not intervened, might have wiped out that 

 branch of the race. 



The resources of the Arctic are not, however, limited to hunting, even 

 if we include with hunting the breeding of fur-bearing animals. Outside 

 Greenland, with its ice-sheet covering 94 per cent, of the island, a com- 

 paratively small area of Arctic lands at present bears permanent ice. 

 The Canadian Arctic islands are free except small ice-sheets in the east, 

 in parts of Ellesmere and Baffin Islands ; the Eurasian Islands have more, 

 though there are large free areas in Spitsbergen and the south island of 

 Novaya Zemlya, while the whole of the mainland areas of Siberia, Alaska, 

 and Canada, which can by any stretch of meaning be called Arctic, are 

 free from permanent ice. Beyond the northern limit of trees there may 

 be said, at a rough estimate, to be about 5,000,000 square miles of ice-free 

 land, or considerably more than the total area of the United States. 

 Most of this is covered with some kind of tundra. The mainland and some 

 of the island areas have a close covering which in favoured places may 

 attain a luxuriance and vigour of growth which has little relation to 

 latitude and contradicts all preconceived notions of Arctic productivity. 

 Thus western Ellesmere Island and north-western Greenland are noted for 

 their vegetatiou. In other places the plant covering is open, and on 



