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My research interest in the settlement of the new North-West dates back to the summer of 1929 when I was asked to make a preliminary study of the Peace River Country which was one of the "Frontiers of Settlement" studies published during the first half of the nineteen-thirties. During the following summer the field study was completed and the Settlement of the Peace River Country was published in 1934. This study made familiar to the author the Alberta and British Columbia divisions of the Peace River region from Notikewin, seventy-five miles north of Grimshaw through the settlements of the Peace as far west as Fort St. John. Among many communities studied in this survey were Notikewin on the north-east fringe of settlement and Dawson Creek which forms the southern anchor of the Alaska Highway. The opening of the Alaska Highway, built between 1942 and 1944, together with the oil developments along the MacKenzie River and the mineral production of the Precambrian area just east of it, focused attention on this new North-West. The possibilities of settlement in this far north-western territory have received wide publicity. Among others, I spent the summer of 1944 in this great stretch of territory, which lies north of the Peace River and extends from a line drawn from Waterways to Coronation Gulf on the east, (approximately the western boundary of the Precambrian Shield), to the Alaska Highway on the west. The northern boundary of the territory studied is the Arctic Ocean. My own part of this survey included also that part of Alaska served by the Alaska railroad and the highway network which lies between Fairbanks and Anchorage.

On these annual ceremonial occasions it has been customary to have an Economist look at Economics, a Statistician discuss the role of Statistics, the Historian look at History, or all the Social Scientists look concertedly at some synthetic product called Social Science. There have been some exceptions to this type of procedure. I shall take my cue from the latter and discuss some matters in the Canadian scene in which the various Social Sciences have a common interest.Canada's Population Possibilities. In the first place, let us consider Canada's population. In recent years we have heard much about the so-called over-populated and under-populated countries. The crudest form in which notions of this kind are presented is in terms of number of people per square mile of land surface. By this device Canada's 2½ per square mile seems to demonstrate obvious under-population as compared with England's 390, forgetting that this 390 involves resources not only at home but also abroad. We seem to be on safer ground when we take arable land surface as a base for presenting population densities. Then Canada seems not so vacant with 121 to the square mile. The arable land index should be supplemented by indices of available minerals and closely allied items. Such measuring rods could be extended to include (1) real income trends for the country as a whole as well as for its varied occupations, (2) the employment index, and (3) trends in population growth. These merely suggest some of the indices that could be used to make comparisons of population pressure on the living space of different countries.

Comte, writing a century ago, claimed that in human affairs we were just entering the scientific stage. Already the physical sciences had made an auspicious beginning. They have made spectacular advances since Comte's pronouncement. Nevertheless, extensive areas in the physical sciences remain to be explored. Still wider areas in the domain of the social sciences await systematic investigation and precise analysis. The need for scientific advances as a means of meeting recurring crises in human affairs seems more necessary than in the days of Comte. It is quite evident today that we have greater sophistication, more extensive questioning, and a more marked social self-consciousness. The word scientific, widely and loosely used, seems to symbolize the temper of our age.