The Arctic Fauna

Abstract

GREAT interest in arctic exploration during the V-T last few decades has resulted in a large number of publications on its fauna, mostly descriptive in character and restricted either to certain areas or to groups of animals. The only comprehensive work on the subject is the well-known “Fauna Arctica,” written by numerous contributors under the editorship of Roemer and Schaudinn, which contains extensive lists of animals, mostly devoid of any general information and useful mainly for the statistics of the fauna. The questions of the origin and evolution of the arctic fauna have been attacked by some zoogeographers ; but their comprehensive treatment from a modern point of view was lacking. This gap is now filled by Prof. N. J. Kusnezov, who has succeeded in less than a hundred pages in presenting a remarkably concise and clear survey of the whole problem.^*