It is evident that this hot water, capable of distribution over a considerable area of land, makes an exceedingly favourable condition for subarctic agriculture, and a great deal of ground has been put under cultivation with large yield of potatoes and cabbage and other vegetables. But the limitations of Alaskan conditions have shorn all profit from the enterprise. There is no considerable market nearer than Fairbanks, almost two hundred miles away by the river. If the potatoes are allowed to remain in the ground until they are mature, there is the greatest danger of the whole crop freezing while on the way to market, and in any case the truck-farmers around Fairbanks find that their proximity to the consumer more than offsets the advantage of the Hot Springs. [Sidenote: ARCTIC AGRICULTURE] When the great initial difficulties of farming in Alaska are overcome, when the moss is removed and the ground, frozen solidly to bedrock, is broken and thawed, when its natural acidity is counteracted by the application of some alkali, and its reeking surface moisture is drained away; when after three or four years' cultivation it begins to make some adequate return of roots and greens, there remains the constant difficulty of a market. Around the mining settlements and during the uncertain life of the mining settlements, truck-farming pays very well, but it could easily be overdone so that prices would fall below the point of any profit at all. Transportation is expensive, and rates for a short haul on the rivers are high, out of all proportion to rates for the long haul from the outside, so that potatoes from the Pacific coast are brought in and sold in competition with the native-grown. And despite the protestations of the agricultural experimental stations, the outside or "chechaco" potato has the advantage of far better quality than that grown in Alaska. Tastes differ, and a man may speak only as he finds. For my part, I have eaten native potatoes raised in almost every section of interior Alaska, and have been glad to get them, but I have never eaten a native potato that compared favourably with any good "outside" potato. The native potato is commonly wet and waxy; I have never seen a native potato that would burst into a glistening mass of white flour, or that had the flavour of a really good potato. There has been much misconception about the interior of Alaska that obtains yet in some quarters, although there is no excuse for it now. Not only the interior of Alaska, but all land at or near sea-level in the arctic regions that is not under glacial ice-caps, is snow free and surface-thawed in the summer and has a luxuriant vegetation. The polar ox (Sverdrup's protest against the term "musk-ox" should surely prevail) ranges in great bands north of the 80th parallel and must secure abundant food; and when Peary determined the insularity of Greenland he found its most northerly point a mass of verdure and flowers.