Dr. Stefansson's articles in any case open up the most
fascinating possibilities. He encourages us to think of the Polar region as a part of the earth where there is still almost unlimited room for expansion. Having himself lived for years in the Arctic circle he regards the discomforts suffered from climate as no more and no less than those of such a place as Winnipeg. Are we on the verge of finding that legend and the occasional traveller have given a quite unnecessarily bad name to little- known districts ? Henry the Navigator, by sailing south down the African coast, exploded the universally- accepted belief of his day that to go far enough south would be to reach a temperature where the sails of the ship would be burned and the crew would be frizzled. At one time America west of the Mississippi was regarded as a huge, inhospitable desert. Actual explorers reported it to be so. Yet it has proved to be a country where, in the historical phrase, you " tickle the land with a hoe and it smiles back with a harvest." It may be that the future historian will say of Dr. Stefansson's plea that private enterprise was in advance of the Government of the day and that it saved Wrangell Island for Great Britain as New Zealand was saved by Wakefield and the Fiji Islands by W. T. Pritchard.
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