96 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



are essential qualities for the task. We may even grant them a greater 

 measure of physical enterprise and love of wandering than other people. 



The Greenland experiment is not, however, a sure criterion of Nordic 

 unsuitability for the Arctic. The pastoral settlement, which is suggested, 

 will be a slow colonisation, in which natural selection 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 wholesome enough in the case of Eskimo and some explorers, 

 it will not be necessary 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 or 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 cannot take as glowing a view of Arctic 

 settlement as Stefansson can, or visualise the same attraction to popula- 

 tion which he forecasts, and 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 

 misconceptions and reduce the area of polar wastes. 



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

 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, and the coal and gypsum of Spitsbergen. Geographical 

 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 con- 

 siderations apply to Arctic copper. But the Arctic lands as a whole, so 

 far as we know, are not rich in mineral wealth. The only one that will 

 eventually have a large mining population is Spitsbergen, and there 

 manufactures may develop in relation to the gypsum and metallic ores. 



The Antarctic has no human problems comparable with those of the 

 Arctic. It is true that whaling has recently invaded the Antarctic, with 



