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about twelve miles a day. On our various expeditions we have
traversed perhaps two thousand miles of similar ice, generally more
mobile and dangerous. The numerous hospitable traders and reindeer-
owning natives of Siberia, therefore, were near neighbors, as things
look to an arctic explorer. Hadley was constantly saying that his
next ambition was to go bach to Wrangell Island to establish himself
there permanently.

We talked much of Hadley's colonizing Wrangell Island
with my co-operation. I was as much in love with the Arctic after
eleven years as he was after twenty five In our mind's eye we could
see the northward march of civilization down the great rivers of
Canada and Siberia constantly coming nearer that island-dotted Medi-
terranean between the Old world and the New which we call the Arctic
Ocean. We foresaw that air navigation by dirigibles and planes
would have a special field in this new development and that the arctic
islands would, therefore, acquire a positional value in addition to
whatever intrinsic value they might have by reason of their mineral
riches or their vegetation and animal life. I took it for certain
that the first permanent transarctic air route for fast mail and for
passengers in a hurry would be north from London and then south to
Tokyo. This route would mean a saving of several thousand miles
in distance and, in our opinion, would be preferable in some ways
to any other flying route between these two great cities. It
would, however, lie far from Wrangell Island and would at first
sight appear to have no bearing upon its value. But we knew that
for a hundred years the treeless prairies of north America had been
considered worthless because they had no trees, and then the point
of view had suddenly changed so that the farmers actually began to
prefer the prairie to the forest. When that change in mental