SECTION E.—GEOGRAPHY. 
SOME ASPECTS OF THE POLAR 
REGIONS 
ADDRESS BY 
PROF. F: DEBENHAM, 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
WE are accustomed to the saying that the world is becoming smaller every 
year, yet it is still the privilege of very few to visit personally all the 
major regions of the world. We do say, and say wisely, that it is the 
duty of geographers, if possible, to visit the lands of which they read and 
write ; but we know all the time that this is a counsel of perfection so 
rarely attained that it may almost be left out of practical consideration. 
We are, in fact, in the mass, still immobile on this world of ours, and we 
still have to take our impressions of regions other than our own from picture 
and narrative. Nevertheless, with so many travellers apt at descriptive 
writing, with such a world-wide Press, and, perhaps even more vitally, 
with so much broadcasting, we can, if we care to try, summon a very 
clear picture of the main natural regions of the world. It is not, for in- 
stance, difficult for the normal reader to imagine the green hell of the 
Amazonian forest, the parched solitudes of the great desert belts, or the 
towering magnificence of the Himalaya. 
Each of us, according to the extent of our reading and the vigour 
of our imagination, carries a picture in our minds of these major regions, 
and no doubt all of you have a fairly vivid picture of the polar regions in 
your minds. What is not so easy to come by, however, is an appreciation 
of that picture in terms of its value to mankind. I propose, therefore, to 
guide your facility for correlation by briefly sketching, not the polar regions 
themselves, of which you already have an idea, but the influence those 
regions may have, and perhaps should have, on both the material and the 
ethical progress of mankind. 
There is now a vast literature of the polar regions, both north and 
south, but the proportion of those books and papers which deal with the 
subject on a broad basis is very small, and is certainly not easily accessible. 
In many of these books we are invited to conjure up the sensations of the 
polar explorer, to feel his frost-bites, to savour his pemmican, to glory in 
his pack-ice and his glaciers, even to die his death. Not the least part 
of our interest in polar work is due to these invitations so graphically 
offered to us in text and illustration. 
Much more rare is it to find a polar explorer viewing his territory as 
a whole, and trying to fit it into the scheme of the world in general. In 
