Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/271

Rh polar zones a "monotony of cold" replaces the "monotony of heat" of the tropics, and instead of the spur of the temperate zone seasons there is the depressing, long, polar night. There is a minimum of life. Plants are few and lowly. Land animals which depend upon plant food must therefore likewise be few in number. Farming and cattle raising cease. The reindeer, which manages to find sufficient food in the lowly Arctic vegetation, is the mainstay of the Arctic natives. But the reindeer must wander far and wide in search of their moss. And many reindeer are needed to provide sustenance for one man. Population is small, and scattered. There are no permanent settlements at all within the Antarctic Circle. In the Arctic, human settlements are fairly well scattered over a considerable range near the margins of the zone, but with increasing latitude man is more and more rarely seen, and finally he disappears altogether. There will never be permanent settlements at the poles.

Life is hard. Man seeks his food by the chase on land, but chiefly in the sea. Hardly one tenth of Greenland's population could live there without food from the sea. It has been well said that, with every degree of higher latitude, man is forced more and more to obtain his food from the sea. Gales, snow and cold, cause many deaths on land, and also at sea. It has been estimated that about one twenty-fifth of the population of Iceland perishes through being lost in snowstorms, by freezing or by drowning. The polar limit of permanent human settlements is believed by Bessels to be fixed, not by the decreasing temperature, but by the increase in the length of the night, which shortens the time during which man can lay up food, by hunting and fishing, to last him through the polar night.

Culture in the Polar Zones.—Under such adverse conditions it is not hard to see that progress towards a higher culture is not a reasonable expectation. There is little time in which man may seek to develop and satisfy his higher needs. Much truth is contained in Guyot's somewhat picturesque statement:

A sparse population, not far advanced in culture or in social relations, is inevitable under polar conditions of climate.

Deserts of Sand and Deserts of Snow.—There is a singular similarity, in their relation to man, of the deserts of sand, near the equator, and the frozen deserts of snow, near the pole, to which I have referred. The relations are interesting, for they illustrate very clearly how similar climatic controls, acting through plant and animal life, affect the life of man in the same large way. I can not select a better example for closing my discussion this afternoon.