THE VALUE OF ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION 



"appeal of the unknown." Our lonely little planet is, 

 so far as we know, the only habitat of sentient beings 

 of the human type. There are nearly two thousand 

 million of us clustered on the fifty million square miles 

 of the better-known continents. Surely it is the duty 

 of man to learn all he can with regard to this great 

 new continent of Antarctica, which is certainly not the 

 least in area, for it is larger than Australia and quite 

 probably larger than the whole of Europe. A fair 

 estimate for the area of Antarctica is four and one- 

 half million square miles — while these other continents 

 are decidedly smaller." 



The world has been educated to revere astronomical 

 research, and governments feel it part of their duty to 

 support public observatories for the study of far dis- 

 tant stars. I hope for a time w^hen the larger nations 

 of the world will look nearer home and subsidize work 

 on this very large segment of their own planet, whose 

 study would repay them equally well in the advance of 

 scientific knowledge. No scientist ever needs to be con- 

 verted to a belief in the value of Antarctic exploration. 

 There is hardly a branch of science which is not await- 

 ing help from data to be studied properly only in the 

 inaccessible lands of high latitudes. But since the lay- 

 man is naturally not so familiar with these fundamental 

 problems of science as he is with the more practical 

 problems of applied knowledge, it will perhaps not be 

 out of place for me briefly to traverse this aspect of 

 Antarctic research. 



2 Australia has an area of three million, and Europe of three 

 and nine-tenths million square miles. 



3 



