Author: Otto Nordenskjöld

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-10-26

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9780265752609

Excerpt from The Geography of the Polar Regions: Consisting of a General Characterization of Polar Nature and a Regional Geography of the Arctic and the Antarctic With mystic force the Polar Regions, like other distant and little known parts of the globe, have long appealed to our imagination and interest. To be sure, man in general is primarily interested in studies that deal with man himself, and in this respect the Polar Re gions have little to offer, if we disregard the story of man's long struggle to conquer even these, the most inaccessible parts of the globe. But few subjects arouse greater general interest than the description Of our natural environment, and this holds especially true of the parts of the globe where the natural forces seem to conspire to prevent and deter human presence and development - regions that man has not yet succeeded wholly in penetrating. Of the five main types into which nature divides the earth's surface, there are, besides the sea, which alone occupies three-quarters Of the globe, and the diversified landscape of the humid temperate zones in which dwell the majority of peoples of Western civilization, three types entirely foreign to us, namely the primeval forests of the tropics, the wide and open spaces of the deserts and steppes, and the Polar Regions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.