4 XT. S. NATIONAL MTTSEITM BULLETIN 217 



the winter I was asked to prepare a plan for a larger laboratory 

 structure. From the skillful designs of Ben Atkinson, and with 

 energetic construction by the Arctic Contractors, the new laboratory 

 was ready in the summer of 1948 to be occupied by about 40 scientists. 

 About 20 remained during the winter of 1948-49. 



The summer of 1949 Scholander and I spent compiling the results 

 of our studies in Alaska. George MacGinitie had taken over direc- 

 tion of the Arctic Kesearch Laboratory. I was more attracted to 

 research in the field than to the duties which tend to surround the 

 direction of scientific programs, and as Joseph C. Mountin and Jack C. 

 Haldeman were preparing to establish for the Public Health Service 

 at Anchorage a laboratory for studying conditions basic to the main- 

 tenance of health in arctic Alaska, in the autumn of 1949 I joined 

 them in the Arctic Health Research Center, where I have since con- 

 tinued my studies on adaptation to arctic cold. 



At Barrow in 1947 we had found the birds of the arctic coast 

 fairly well identified by the succession of naturalists (Bailey, 1948) 

 who followed the pioneer study of Murdoch (1885) during the First 

 International Polar Year. It is interesting that Ray (1885), the 

 young lieutenant of engineers in charge of making these two years of 

 geophysical recordings, also made the first significant anthropological 

 report on the arctic Alaskan Eskimo. The coastal mammals, too, 

 were known in 1947 but, as with the other fauna, their distribution 

 and relations to terrain and seasons could not be described from the 

 occasional collections which had been made. Only a few land 

 animals can live through the long cold winter of the arctic coast, with 

 its strong and often violent winds; and from June through August, 

 when overcast skies and fog are more common than sunshine and snow 

 flurries and frost occur frequently, warm days are too rare to produce 

 more than a scant growth of vegetation for their sustenance. 



The Interior of Arctic Alaska 



For our studies we needed to know a greater variety of animals than 

 we could find along the arctic coast and so we turned toward the inte- 

 rior of arctic Alaska. It is true that much had been earlier observed 

 in the interior of arctic Alaska, but the biological information was 

 discontinuous in time and space and restricted to identification of 

 forms in only a few systematic categories. Geologists had surveyed 

 the interior. During the winter of 1926-27 A. E. and Robert Porsild 

 (1929) traveled by dog team from Buckland River along the Alaskan 

 coast to Aklavik, surveying the flora and conditions for the route of 

 the Canadian reindeer herd which was subsequently settled on the 

 eastern side of the Mackenzie Delta. In 1947 there had been no 

 reports on man or animals in the interior north of the ornithological 



