In the following notes an attempt has been made to summarise the main facts which anyone dealing with the literature and cartography of Svalbard would require to know in order to give a correct rendering of the place-names and to understand the changes in form which have taken place. The writer wishes to express his grateful thanks to Professor A. Sommerfelt for much assistance in connection with the linguistic aspects of the subject, and to Dr Anders K. Orvin, of the Norsk Polarinstitutt, Oslo, who kindly checked the whole manuscript.

Richard Maitland Laws (Fig. 1) died on 7 October 2014. Usually known as known as Dick Laws, his career spanned the world. From his Northumbrian upbringing his career as a zoologist took him via Cambridge University to the Southern Ocean, the cold of Antarctica, the heat of Africa, the Directorship of the British Antarctic Survey and the Mastership of a Cambridge College.

In northern Canada, the provision of the amenities that twentieth-century technology has made available to everyday life is complicated by several factors. Chief among these are the severity of the climate and the fact that the population is small and scattered, which often means that the expense of such an amenity is considerably greater than it is in the southern part of the country.

These notes, which are arranged in no special order, represent some of the facts learnt and impressions received during this visit. I made an earlier visit to the same general area of north-east Siberia in October 1965.

The Permafrost Institute [Institut Merzlotovedeniya], Yakutsk

The Director, P. I. Mel'nikov, was in Canada for two months on an exchange visit. His Deputies are now F. E. Are, who was here in 1965, and I. I. Tuchkov, a geologist recently transferred from the Yakut Filial to take N. A. Grave's place. These two looked after me in the friendliest and most helpful way.

There are many young people in New Zealand, in Australia, here in Canada, and especially those who knew him in Cambridge, in Birmingham, and in his home town of Tewkesbury, who will mourn the passing of Sir Raymond Priestley as friend and counsellor. I think it is fitting that I should write my tribute to his sterling qualities, since I have known him for 64 long years as a friend, as a collaborator and, for 60 years, as a relation by marriage with Edith Mary Priestley, one of his sisters.

The first photographed observation of the harbour porpoise in Svalbard is reported. The harbour porpoise is not normally found in the high Arctic as it is a temperate and sub Arctic species, the nearest frequent location for the species being the north coast of Norway.

In 2010, after many interviews by the Qikiqtani Truth Commission (QTC), the Qikiqtani Inuit Association released a report to help the public understand the impact of tuberculosis on the Inuit and thereby promote reconciliation, a goal shared by this study. In this paper, I discuss a corpus of about 28 letters by an Inuit patient named Genevieve Aupidlak who was treated at the Brandon Sanatorium from 1954 to 1957. The letters have been transcribed from old syllabics and translated. Aupidlak's story shows not only the suffering of Inuit in southern sanatoria but also the role of Christianity and that of some missionaries—such as Father Thibert—in supporting Inuit resilience. Aupidlak's letters illustrate how Inuit used their Christian faith to survive and how they ascribed healing power to Christian prayer and confession, in keeping with a much older shamanic pattern.

Ever since the end of the Second World War men who served on ships, both naval and merchant, which were involved in the transport of war materials to north Russia between 1941 and 1945 have sought recognition for their service with an appropriate campaign medal. They have failed to achieve this through a complicated muddle of government policy, ignorance and cold-heartedness.