382 T. C. CHAMBERLIN 



and in the course of the last hundred years some half a dozen Arctic 

 expeditions have wintered here."^ 



The singular abundance of the lower life of this region has been 

 the subject of so much surprised comment and vivid description 

 by Arctic explorers and scientific visitors for the last century that 

 there is no need to go into much detail here. There is a well-rounded 

 fauna which embraces long chains of species dependent on one 

 another for support. This impHes permanence and steadiness of 

 evolution. These biologic chains reach from great predaceous 

 sea mammals, birds and man, down through many intermediate 

 types to minute orders of sea or land Hfe. It is to be noted that no 

 large part of the life in this region consists of outre forms dependent 

 on scant supplies of food and on protection by isolation, as in the 

 case of the Antarctic penguins and Hke types. The fauna here 

 embraces multitudes of migrant forms of bird Hfe of wide-ranging 

 types which congregate here to feed and to nest. Such large 

 assemblages are the best of evidence of climatic geniality and rich- 

 ness of feeding ground. There is also a large non-migrant element 

 which must of course find food during the winter, and this sufiiciency 

 of winter food is in itself an unequivocal form of testimony to the 

 hospitality of the cUmate. 



The life of the tract occupied by the Danish Colony has been 

 quite fully studied, and is set forth in Rink's "Greenland" and in 

 many later papers. It will suffice for this discussion to refer to 

 Seward's recent statement — quoted in the review of his book on A 

 Summer in Greenland in a recent number of this Journal^ — to the 

 effect that while not a flowering plant is known in the Antarctic 

 region nearer the pole than 62^ S. Lat., more than 400 species of 

 flowering plants grow in Greenland above the corresponding north 

 latitude. 



However, notwithstanding this abundance of hfe, it is to be 

 clearly understood that the present Greenland oases are merely 

 remarkable amehorations of Arctic climates. They are not climates 

 of the warm temperate or subtropical sort, such as are implied by 



I The North Pole (1910), p. 36. 



= A. C. Seward, A Summer in Greenland. Review by T. C. Chamberlin, Jour, of 

 GeoL, Vol. XXXI (1923), No. 3, pp. 253-55. 



