It has been said that scientific truths begin as heresies and end as myths, enjoying a period of orthodox acceptance in between. It must be rare, if this is so, for a myth to be imposed upon the public as a “truth”, to be accepted immediately as such, and then to suffer excommunication as heresy. Such a case is at hand in the matter of the sea-life area of the Atlantic Salmon in Davis Strait and of the start of a new pelagic fishery.

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 north of Yakutia has long been known to be an immense storehouse of frozen disjointed bones of many hundreds of thousands of large Pleistocene mammals—mammoths, horses, woolly rhinoceroses, bison, musk-oxen— “horned cattle”, as the first Russian travellers called them. Such knowledge had a commercial value, of whichmore will be said below, for the quarrying of mammoth ivory has gone on for many centuries. In quality these tusks, which have lain in frozen ground for tens of millennia, are as good as those of modern African and Indian elephants and are sometimes two or three times larger. For naturalists, the greatest interest lies in the discovery of whole frozen bodies or of skulls and complete skeletons. Study of the position of these bodiesand their morphology and of the contents of their stomachs and intestines may answer the age-old question of why the mammoth (or woolly elephant), together with this rich assemblage of large herbivores, died out. Would even a partial restoration of such previously abundant life be possible there today?

Systematic optical and radio measurements from ground stations, together with measurements from rockets and satellites, have led to a good general understanding of auroras. However one topic remains conjectural: whether or not there is audible auroral sound.

Of all the high latitude theatres of naval operations in World War II. the Kara Sea theatre represents one of the most interesting, yet one of the least known. Hostilities in the Kara Sea were based on the belief held by German Naval Command that the Northern Sea Route was being utilized for the movement of Lend-Lease materials from the Pacific coasts of Canada and the USA to the Russian front (Armstrong 1953:823, 1955:141; Huan 1958:156; Mineyev 1964:39). German attempts to disrupt these alleged movements were limited almost entirely to naval operations; the Luftwaffe played little part, since even the south-western approaches to the Kara Sea were out of reach of aircraft based in northern Norway (Huan 1958:156). Most of the activity involved U-boat attacks on shipping and on coastal sites, but on one occasion a German surface vessel, the heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer was involved.

C. E. Borchgrevink was born in Christiania (present-day Oslo) in 1864. His Norwegian father was a lawyer, and his English mother was a Miss Ridley. Little is known about his early years, but he said he had part of his education at Gjertsen College. He was a full-time student from the winter term 1885 to the winter term 1888 at the Royal Forestry School, Tharandt, Saxony, but seems to have obtained no certificate or diploma; later he mentioned that he had been a pupil of Professor E. Nobbe. When he was in his thirties he told H. J. Bull that he had been educated at Christiania University, but there is no evidence to support this. He also said he had served as a boy or apprentice in the Borghild in 1878, crossing the Atlantic in her, but there are no details.

If one is sufficiently bold or foolish to ask why the musk-ox Ovibos moschatus was domesticated, even a superficial review of the available evidence suggests that several answers may be given, depending upon the viewpoint from which the question is posed. I have argued elsewhere (Wilkinson, 1972a; 1973) that the domestication of the musk-ox was inevitable if the exploitation of musk-oxen was to continue in the present century. Because of certain biological and behavioural characteristics, musk-oxen can be exploited in only two ways without endangering their survival or exceeding their capacity to regenerate their numbers: they may be hunted as what I have called a critical resource, by which I mean a resource that is not exploited regularly (including seasonally) or intensively, but without which human survival is difficult or impossible incertain areas and periods; alternatively, musk-oxen may be exploited on a sustained basis for a combination of meat, milk, robes, or qiviur through domestication. Archaeological and ethnographic evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that, as a general rule, musk-oxen were hunted as a critical resource before the arrival of Europeans in the Canadian Arctic.

In 1967 the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) undertook the first longrange airborne radio echo soundings of the Antarctic ice sheet. The results of this season were encouraging and led to other programmes being organized in 1969–70, 1971–72, and 1974–75. The initial impetus for this work came from A. P. Crary of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), who suggested that the radio echo equipment that had been developed at SPRI under the direction of S. Evans and G. de Q. Robin, with financial assistance from the Royal Society's Paul Instrument Fund and later from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) should be operated over the Antarctic ice sheet, and he offered the logistic support of the US Antarctic Research Program (USARP). Since those early flights, a productive relationship has been developed between SPRI and that arm of NSF represented by USARP and US Navy Task Force 43 (now 199) and, up to the end of the 1971–72 season, it had resulted in 210000 km of radio echo profiling in the Antarctic. A further 135 000 km was accomplished during the 1974–75 season.

Several engineering schemes are now planned or are in various stages of completion to dam, divert, regulate, or otherwise control the flow of several major waterways in the Canadian sub-Arctic. This region, which contains many large river systems (Map 1), is viewed by a number of federal and provincial government departments as a source of reliable and relatively inexpensive electricity to satisfy the energy-deficient markets of southern Canada and northern United States. However, opposition to these hydroelectric schemes is being voiced across Canada by critics who view them as having or likely to have negative effects on the environment and on the native peoples who inhabit the region. This review examines some of the alleged benefits and costs of four of the most controversial and best publicized of these projects. The information has come from a variety of sources: published literature and press reports, unpublished government documents and consultants' reports, notes taken at public hearings in 1972 and 1973, discussions with government officials, consultants, and other investigators between 1969 and 1974, and research by the senior author between 1968 and 1973 on the effects of hydroelectric developments on the northern environment (Gill, 1971; 1972a, 1972b; 1973a, 1973b, 1973c, 1973d; 1974; Kellerhals and Gill, 1973).

The study of marine life from the bottom of Arctic and sub-Arctic seas has long been a topic of scientific interest, and such work represents an important part of contemporary biological research in the polar regions. Contributions to this field have been made through the collective efforts of investigators from many nations over the years and include findings of considerable significance for life science studies as a whole, as well as for specific polar problems. Together with contemporary research on the pelagic and planktonic biota of northern waters, current work on the bottom fauna (benthos) offers much potential for developing our fundamental knowledge of biological processes in the Arctic seas.

Since Greene and Greene (1963) published their check list of the sub-Antarctic and Antarctic vascular flora, a number of works have appeared which have added new taxa for the region and new records for many of the islands. Some nomenclatural changes have also become necessary following taxonomic revisions so the present check list, which adopts a style and layout similar to that used by Greene and Greene (1963), takes the opportunity to incorporate all of these emendations. Although this paper refers to all taxa noted by Greene and Greene (1963), not all of the sources cited by those authors have been repeated.

The Victoria Valley system, Wright Valley and Taylor Valley, often referred to colloquially as the dry-valley area, together cover about 4 000 km2 in the Transantarctic Mountains west of McMurdo Sound (Fig 1) and constitute the core of the largest ice-free area in Antarctica. It is a cold desert area, with high winds, low temperatures, low precipitation, and a strong positive radiation balance (Bull, 1966).

The range of the barren-ground caribou in Canada includes approximately 700 000 square miles [1 812 993 sq km]: north from the forests of Manitoba and Saskatchewan to the Arctic Ocean and west from Hudson Bay to Alaska. Much of that vast expanse of stunted forests and tundra remained virtually unmapped until the ingress of the aeroplane in the 1930's.

In reviewing the conservation of Arctic fauna, it may be useful to describe what is meant, geographically and ecologically, by the word Arctic, as it is used here. Geographical boundaries are not often the same as ecological boundaries, and the Arctic Circle itself has no zoogeographical significance. Permanently ice-covered land and treeless lands with permanently frozen subsoil in the Northern Hemisphere would be included in any definition of the Arctic region, and in northern countries the timber line constitutes a satisfactory southern limit for the region in question. In mountains, it is altitude rather than latitude that gives an Arctic character to climate and landscape, as in the Urals, the mountain chain of Scandinavia (south to 59°N) and eastern Siberia, and the Rocky Mountains of North America.

There have been many great men in the history of the Canadian eastern Arctic, and it must be admitted from the start that Jackson was not one of them. He was a minor figure, but in the early years of this century he exerted an influence in the region out of proportion to his own importance. It may be that he did nobody any good, and it is true that nobody had any good to say of him. What Jackson did was to promote his own fantasies until solider men fell under his spell, and these men then took actions that ended disastrously. But, when surveying the career of Captain Jackson, one may depart from the usual opinion that he was a rogue and a liar. He was unstable—unstable to, and probably beyond, the point of insanity—and he deserves more sympathy than he received from his contemporaries.

In 1897–98 I went to lies Kerguelen on a sealing expedition in the sealer Edward, returning to London later in 1898. It was through this that I learned that Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink was in London preparing an Antarctic expedition. He had served as an ordinary seaman in Antarctic in 1894–95 when H. J. Bull made a voyage to the Ross Sea, making the first landing in Victoria Land.

Waste products from man's activities, released into the environment, distribute themselves between the atmosphere, the land, the sea and, through these, to the biota. There is a constant interchange of material between reservoirs leading, it is thought, to an ultimate sinking of trace materials into the depths of the ocean where they slowly accumulate on the ocean bed and are removed from the circulation system. Substances released into the air can rise into the upper atmosphere and spread all over the world before they finally sediment into the lower atmosphere and suffer washout. The overall lifetime of a particular pollutant is determined by its concentration in each reservoir and by its rate of transfer between different pairs of reservoirs. A major goal for scientists is to achieve a quantitative description of this process for the major pollutants so that in the future it may be possible to predict the changing concentrations with time, in each reservoir, of a potentially harmful pollutant of known input rate into the environment.