84 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
It also is usually of a temporary nature, and the man who considers him- 
self most content in the heart of the Sahara, or on the plateau of Green- 
land, is very often so content because he knows that at the end of a certain 
term of residence in such a place he has Paris or Piccadilly to return to 
for contrast. When he does return, however, he is likely to be bothered 
and fussed with the apparently seething mass of his fellow creatures, to 
be bustled out of his contentment by a world of telephones and postmen 
and the daily press, and to consider very quickly that the lives and aims 
of men in the mass are sordid and small compared to the simple life of 
the lands from whence he has returned. We may smile at these psycho- 
logical effects, and we may consider that the explorer type, who is rest- 
less in civilisation, is a person apart, to be given his way but not to be 
pampered. 
On the other hand, we must not forget that not only are holidays neces- 
sary to man, but that, with increasing rapidity and ease of transport, the 
holidays of civilised peoples will tend to be taken farther afield. Even 
before the War there were such things as pleasure cruises to the North; 
but what is just as feasible and has not yet come, is the extension of these 
cruises into summer holidays on land in the Arctic. Nor is it too wild a 
forecast to say that in time to come there may be a Brighton of Spitzbergen, 
a resurrection, in fact, of the Smeerenberg of two centuries ago, when 
each summer a large township established itself on Spitzbergen for the 
whaling. The township will be a city of rest and holiday instead of a 
city of greasiness and blubber; but the means of establishing such a 
centre come closer to hand with every new invention. 
It is true that the Antarctic can never be considered a playground for 
the southern hemisphere, except for those who are willing to undergo 
an uncomfortable, if not a risky, sea voyage or a rather long aerial journey. 
It is true also that in the North, under present circumstances, the amount 
of territory available for holiday purposes is practically confined to 
Spitzbergen, now known as Svalbard. The accessible parts of Greenland, 
for instance, belong to the Greenlander under the careful guardianship 
of Denmark, and must not be looked upon as a holiday resort. The 
Franz Josef Archipelago is not always accessible, and the more distant 
Nova Zemlya, as well as the Canadian Arctic islands, will be for a long 
time to come too far from the main centres of population in Europe and 
America. 
This consideration of the polar regions as a holiday resort for the citizens 
of crowded lands, leads us naturally to a far greater value which has as 
yet hardly been considered by civilisation, a value which indeed may yet 
prove to be more worthy of study than all those we have so far mentioned: 
It is reasonable to suppose that when some far-travelled medical man comes 
to write a book on the geography of diseases we shall be able to come by 
a clear idea of where health is best to be sought. The ordinary geo- 
grapher would, however, even now be able to make something of an essay 
on the distribution of healthiness over the world. Leaving out cities as _ 
unnatural, or at least unhealthy aggregations of humans, he would at once 
say that on the whole the most unhealthy parts of the world were in the 
Tropics, though he would have to have a special category for tropical and 
