86 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
cautious as to results, but at the same time let us preserve our sense of 
proportion in the value to man of how we spend money in the polar 
regions. It is almost lamentable to consider the sums of money which 
have been spent in what you will all understand by the term of ‘ stunt 
expeditions ’ and place those sums in contrast to the difficulty in raising 
money for such an object as this. 
I am aware that in thus inviting consideration of the possibility of 
establishing sanatoria in the polar regions I shall be incurring the dis- 
pleasure of explorers, both of the past and of the present; but my answer 
to such would be that the end is worthy of the means, and that just as 
an. Alpine hotel, full of youth and health, can now be found one hundred 
yards from a sanatorium filled with the ailing, there is room in the polar 
regions both for sanatoria and for expeditions. 
We may now turn to yet another aspect of the polar regions, and one 
which possibly has a more direct appeal to this Association of scientists 
than those which have so far occupied our attention, namely, the value 
to the scientist, both pure and applied, of the phenomena which are 
peculiar to these regions—phenomena whose existence is well known but 
whose study is still in its early stages. 
No doubt each science will claim the chief value of these phenomena 
for itself, but it is without any particular bias to one or the other that 
I should venture to place in the first rank the subject of meteorology as 
likely in the future to gain most by a prolonged and more intensive study 
in high latitudes. 
We have spoken of the more or less permanent blizzards on parts of 
the Antarctic continent, and we ourselves live under the intermittent 
threat of depressions over Iceland. We can therefore, without much 
imagination, see that even if our weather is not actually manufactured 
at the polar ends of the world, it is profoundly affected by them. Meteoro- 
logists themselves have long been aware of this, and in two successive 
onslaughts, namely, in 1882 and in 1932, a determined effort was made 
to collect data simultaneously and widely within the precincts of the 
Arctic. The conclusions which have been drawn from these results are, 
as yet, hardly in full circulation, but you will meet few meteorologists 
who do not sigh for more and more data from the polar regions. 
The phenomena of magnetism and aurora, which are somewhat akin 
to those of meteorology in that they occur in the atmosphere, are also 
best studied in high latitudes, where, too, the most promising investi- 
gations of the ionosphere seem to be likely. 
When we come to the more earthly sciences, the immediate value to 
mankind is perhaps less evident. In the science of geology, for instance, 
especially in its branch of tectonics, we cannot afford to do without close 
investigation of two segments of the earth comprising together nearly 
one-tenth of the surface of the globe, and indeed the structure of the earth 
must become the more interesting the nearer one gets to its axis of rotation. 
The geologist has a hard task in lands where the rocks are usually buried 
beneath ice-caps, and has to be more than usually ready with the in- 
spired guess than in other parts of the world. 
In the Antarctic in particular, the highest of all continents and the most 
