him. It interested the Greeks greatly that there should be some animal so much more foolish than we humans, and they probably began at once to use this story as the basis of what with them corresponded to sermons and editorials. Children have found the idea interesting and moralists useful ever since. The Romans copied it from the Greeks and the Renaissance writers from the Romans and we have it in our school books, not as a Little Red Riding Hood story which we know to be a fairy tale, not as an Alice-in-Wonderland story which nobody believes, but as a sober, supposedly scientific fact which we believed in our time and which the children are believing to-day.

I for one believed it for about thirty-five years until I became the housemate of Carl Akeley, who knows Africa at least as well by experience as I do the North. One evening after dinner we were talking about big game

hunting and he remarked that nearly the canniest big game animal of Africa is the ostrich, and one of the most difficult to approach. When I said I didn't see how it could be very difficult to approach an animal that stands in the open and hides his head in the sand, Akeley replied that he does that only in the books.

Since then I have asked many African travelers who have all said that they have never seen anything to lead them to believe that any ostrich ever hid his head in the sand when he was frightened. I asked Colonel Roosevelt about it once. He replied in substance that while in Africa he had been greatly interested in this. He had inquired from various white men down there who had never seen any evidence of it, and from various Negroes who have never heard of it. His comment was: "You see, those Negroes had not had the advantage of American education!"

Although I accepted for half a lifetime as a

fact the story of the ostrich, I can now see that no testimony is required, but only a moment's serious thought, to show that it could not be true. Just imagine what you would do if you were a leopard or a lion or a hyena and were hungry in a country inhabited by foolish birds that stood around with their heads buried. I think if I were a leopard I would go up and bite their necks. Obviously every ostrich in Africa would be killed within a year if they did not have some adequate way of hiding and fleeing and defending themselves, but stood around instead in an attitude of complete helplessness.

In spite of common sense and testimony, the ostriches with

war for more than a year after it started, and during the entire course of the war we received fragmentary and indefinite news of it only three times during the five years.. We came south just in time for Armistice Day. While in the North I had not realized clearly the conditions, but on coming south

I found that in our absence people in America had been on rations and in Europe they had been hungry, not only our opponents but even our allies. It became pressing then to do something to get either the Canadian Government or some large corporation to begin the development of the meat-producing resources of the North. This led to the advocacy of those plans which have since been taken up in Canada and which will be described in a future article on what Canada and Alaska are already doing in the way of commercial meat production.

their heads in the sand have prevailed in our literature for more than two thousand years. So it is not particularly remarkable that the mosses and lichens without any reason in sense or in fact have prevailed in our books for a number of centuries.

My first year in the Arctic I saw everything through a haze of romance and did not for a while realize that it was a very commonplace country. But during ten more years I spent there the realization has been gradually growing on me that one of the chief problems of the world, and particularly one of the chief problems of Canada and Siberia, is to begin to make use of all the vast quantities of grass that go to waste in the North every year. The obvious thing is to find. some domestic animal that will eat the grass. Then when the animal is big and

I commenced the advocacy of government action in Canada by laying my ideas and tentative plans before Mr. Meighen. It did not take me long to convince him that the matter was of great importance and that it demanded immediate investiga

fat it should be butchered and shipped down here and the meat used where the food is needed.

On my last polar expedition I sailed north the spring of 1913, more than a year before the war started. We did not hear about the

tion. If the investigation bore out my contentions it would be of manifest importance that something should be done at once. The world in general needed more food, and Canada in particular. If she really had great meat-producing resources, Canada should begin at once to develop them for the economic advantage of her citizens. If she could produce food and harbor colonists on

her northern no less than on her western prairies, she had before her, in terms of population and wealth, a national destiny hitherto undreamt. She must investigate; and if the facts justified it, she must act.

It is said with some truth that Americans