Page Content (OCR)
miles and came to a land of trees, as Gardner believed would exist there, and also a warmer climate, as shown by the rivers, lakes, vegetation and animal life Gardner writes: "That the musk-ox is not the only animal to be found where we should hardly expect it, is evident from a note in Hayes' diary. When he was in latitude 78 degrees, 17 minutes, early in July, he said: ‘I secured a yellow- winged butterfly, and - who would believe it - a mosquito. And also ten moths, three spiders, two bees and two flies."" Since these insects are not found further south, a land of ice and snow, the only explanation Gardner could offer for their origin is that they came from the interior of the earth through the polar opening. Hayes' observations of insect life in the extreme north were confirmed by Greely, in his book "Three Years of Arctic Service," describing his observations in the Arctic, begun in 1881. In the preface to his book, Greely tells us that the wonders of the Arctic regions are so great that he was forced to modify his actual notes made at the time, and understated them rather than lay himself open to the suspicion of exaggerating. That the Arctic regions are so full of life and strange evidence of life farther north, that an explorer cannot describe it without being accused of exaggerating is surely a very strange thing if these regions only lead to a barren land of everlasting ice, as according to older geographical theories. Greely reports birds of an unknown species, butterflies, flies and temperatures of 47 to 50 degrees, also plenty of willow to make fires, and much fresh driftwood. He found two flowers different from any that he had ever seen. In many pages of astronomical evidence, Gardner discusses the bright lights seen shining from the polar caps of Mars, Venus and Mercury, and concludes that these planets all have central suns and polar openings. He claims that the earth has the same and that the aurora borealis results from the projection of the rays of the central sun, passing through the polar opening, on the night sky. Gardner summarizes the evidence in favor of his theory as follows: "As explorers go north of about 80 degrees north latitude, they find that the water, instead of becoming colder in the same ratio in which it had been getting colder as they left the temperate zone, gradually begins to get warm again, and they find that this warmth is brought down from the so-called frozen north in a warm current flowing from the polar regions. Furthermore they find that birds and animals migrate to the north to feed and breed, instead of to the south. In fon. 2 ee Sa te ek toa 8 a ee ie fact, when they get into really high latitudes, explorers find a greater wealth of animal and vegetable life than they do in the lower latitudes of the Arctic and he observed there.