In northern Canada, the provision of the amenities that twentieth-century technology has made available to everyday life is complicated by several factors. Chief among these are the severity of the climate and the fact that the population is small and scattered, which often means that the expense of such an amenity is considerably greater than it is in the southern part of the country.

When considering the problems of building in the north to talk of an architecture of climate would be to tell only half of the story. It is people in the climate, the cities and the landscape, in families or crowds that count. Ordinary people, not architects, people who sometimes are born in the north and know it and love it or hate it, other people who are moving from more populous areas to small isolated communities in the wilderness, and must be given the amenities they previously enjoyed.

In July 1967 the Scott Polar Research Institute secured at public sale the manuscript autobiography, hitherto unknown to scholars, of the Arctic explorer Dr John Rae. The Institute was enabled to pay the unexpectedly high price of the manuscript through the good offices of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which matched Institute funds provided by generous friends in Canada and the United States who have wished not to be named.

These notes, which are arranged in no special order, represent some of the facts learnt and impressions received during this visit. I made an earlier visit to the same general area of north-east Siberia in October 1965.

The Permafrost Institute [Institut Merzlotovedeniya], Yakutsk

The Director, P. I. Mel'nikov, was in Canada for two months on an exchange visit. His Deputies are now F. E. Are, who was here in 1965, and I. I. Tuchkov, a geologist recently transferred from the Yakut Filial to take N. A. Grave's place. These two looked after me in the friendliest and most helpful way.