CHAP. III.] 
MARINE ARCTIC ANIMAL LIFE. 
151 
very few species of these small animals, however, appear to 
survive such a freezing test, and the actual land-evertehrate- 
fauna of the Polar countries is therefore exceedingly scanty in 
comparison with that of more southerly regions. 
It is quite otherwise as regards the sea. Here animal life is 
exceedingly abundant as far as man has succeeded in making his 
way to the farthest north. At nearly every sweep the dredge 
brings up from the sea-bottom masses of decapods, Crustacea, 
mussels, asterids, echini,^ &c., in varying forms, and the surface 
of the sea on a sunny day swarms with pteropods, beroids, 
surface-crustacea, &c. Dr. Stuxberg will give, farther on, a 
sketch of this department of animal life, which in the high 
north is so rich in variety. In the-meantime I can but refer to 
the large number of papers on this subject which have been 
issued in the publications of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. 
Of the higher animal types a greater number within the Polar 
territory occur in the sea than on the land. Thus by far the greater 
number of the birds I have enumerated above belong to the 
sea, not to the land, and this is the case with nearly all the 
animals which for three or four hundred years back have been the 
objects of capture in the Arctic regions. This industry, which 
during the whale-fishing period yielded a return perhaps equal to 
that of the American oil-wells in our time, has not now in the 
most limited degree the importance it formerly had. For the 
animal whose capture yielded this rich return, the right whale 
{Balmna mysticetus L.), is now so extirpated in these navigable 
waters, that the whalers were long ago compelled to seek new 
fishing-places in other parts of the Polar seas. It is therefore 
no longer the whale, but other species of animals which attract 
the hunter to the coasts of Spitzbergen and NTovaya Zemlya. 
Of these animals the most important for the last fifty years 
1 Echini occur only very sparingly in the Kara Sea and the Siberian 
Polar Sea, but west of Novaya Zemlya at certain places in such numbers 
that they almost appear to cover the sea-bottom. 
