320 



SCIENCE 



[Vol. LV, No. 1421 



merely explained to the pupils as the pagan 

 philosophies are explained. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 



The Friendly Arctic. Y. Sa?BFANSSOiT. The 

 Stoi-y of Five Years in Polar Regions, with 

 a foreword by Gilbert Grosvenor, president 

 of the National Geographic Society, and an 

 introduction by Sir Robert Borden, Prime 

 Minister of Canada. New York (Macmillan) 

 1921. Pp. xxxi + 784. 

 It is the habit of scientific men to say that 

 there is no guide for the weU-ordered conduct 

 of the every-day business of living which ap- 

 proaches in validity and all-round usefulness 

 that which is called the scientific method. But 

 while this is strictly orthodox and extremely 

 common preaching, the thoughtful observer of 

 human folkways can not but be impressed with 

 the fact that the correlation between this trite 

 preaching and the actual practice of his friends 

 in the conduct of their own lives, is not of as 

 high an order as it would be expected to be if 

 the preaching were taken at its face value. 

 It is, therefore, an event of great human in- 

 terest as well as of no mean scientific import- 

 ance to have forthcoming a well-nigh complete 

 and perfect example of what happens when 

 scientific methods of thought are translated 

 into action, with something approaching 100 

 per cent, completeness, to the end of living 

 happily, usefully and continuously in a natu- 

 rally harsh environment. Such an event is 

 afforded in this recent book by Stefansson. 



It is from this point of view that, in my 

 opinion, the book has its greatest significance. 

 It contains a wealth of records of achievements 

 in the field of geography in the narrower sense 

 of the word — discoveries and descriptions of 

 new lands, exploration of the bottom of the 

 polar sea by soundings, much exact mapping 

 of coast lines, and the like — whicb I suppose 

 to be of major importance in those fields of 

 science, but being in no wise a specialist in 

 either geography or polar exploration, I am 

 not qualified to express any expert opinion on 

 these matters. But I have a strong conviction, 

 after carefully reading the book twice, that the 

 importance which the history of science is go- 



ing to attach to Stefansson's work in the polar 

 regions wiU rest primarily upon quite another 

 thing than his contributions to geography in 

 the strict and limited sense, significant as I 

 have no doubt these contributions are. 



In temperate, sub-tropical and sub-arctic por- 

 tions of the earth's surface certainly, the zone 

 of freedom in human behavior is, from the 

 viewpoint of evolution, rather wide. Men in 

 such regions are, and must always have been, 

 widely free to develop any sort of habits of 

 life and folkways in general, so far as the 

 eUminative action of the purely physical en- 

 vironment was concerned. Tor example, it 

 makes no difference in terms of survival value 

 so far as one knows, whether ladies dress in 

 the entertaining and colorful manner of the 

 Rumanian peasant, or in the quite different if 

 not less exciting manner of the Fifth Avenue 

 society woman. But the case is biologically 

 quite different in the polar regions. There the 

 zone of freedom in respect of the mode of con- 

 ducting life is extremely narrow. The environ- 

 ment imposes strict and narrow limitations on 

 habits and biological folkways genei'aUy. One 

 conforms or is eliminated. There is no wider 

 range of choice. 



Now presimiably the Eskimo's knowledge of 

 how to live happUy, comfortably and reason- 

 ably long in the Arctic has been very slowly 

 and somewhat painfully wrought into his 

 racial and individual consciousness mainly by 

 the operation of natural selection. Those who 

 did not dress, house themselves, find food, etc., 

 within the Limits of the zone of freedom of in- 

 dividual action rigidly set by the environment 

 are no longer either present or represented in 

 the Eskimo population. The consequence is 

 that the Eskimo is now, as Stefansson has 

 demonstrated with a wealth of detail in this 

 and his earlier book, "My Life with the Es- 

 kimo," a creature extraordinarily weU adapted 

 to his particular environment, and therefore 

 happy in it. 



Prior to Stefansson's work the whites who 

 have adventured into the Arctic as explorers, 

 and the list is a nobly impressive one, hav9 

 unifonnly depended upon what is, in its phil- 

 osophical essence, one and the bame scheme to 



