CHAPTER III. 
From the Animal World of Novaya Zemlya—The Fulmar Petrel—The 
Rotge or Little Auk—Briinnich’s Guillemot—The Black Guillemot— 
The Arctic Puffin—The Gulls—Richardson’s Skua—the Tern—Ducks 
and Geese—The Swan—Waders—The Snow Bunting—The Ptarmigan 
—The Snowy Owl—The Reindeer—The Polar Bear—The Mountain Fox 
—The Lemming—Insects—The Walrus—The Seal—Whales. 
If we do not take into account the few Samoyeds who of 
recent years have settled on Novaya Zemlya or wander about 
during summer on the plains of Vaygats Island, all the lands 
which in the old world have formed the field of research of 
the Polar explorer—Spitzbergen, Franz-Josef Land, Novaya 
Zemlya, Vaygats Island, the Taimur Peninsula, the New 
Siberian Islands, and perhaps Wrangel’s Land also—are unin¬ 
habited. The pictures of life and variety, which the native, 
with his peculiar manners and customs, commonly offers to the 
foreigner in distant foreign lands, are not to be met with here. 
But, instead, the animal life, which he finds there in summer— 
for during winter almost all beings who live above the surface of 
the sea disappear from the highest North—is more vigorous and 
perhaps even more abundant, or, to speak more correctly, less 
concealed by the luxuriance of vegetation than in the south. 
It is not, however, the larger mammalia—whales, walruses, 
seals, bears and reindeer—that attract attention in the first place, 
but the innumerable flocks of birds that swarm around the Polar 
traveller during the long summer day of the North. 
