Sir Edgeworth David 71 



Such a record, achieved in the face of terrible weather 

 in a part of the world about which very little is known 

 even to-day, is one of which any man might well be 

 proud. To be the first man to reach the South Magnetic 

 Pole — the point to which all compasses turn in the whole 

 Southern Hemisphere — Edgeworth David had to haul a 

 loaded sledge for 1260 miles across the great snow desert. 

 But his discoveries seem even more remarkable when we 

 consider that he was fifty years of age at the time when 

 he went south with Shackleton ! Yet he carried out his 

 work on the Ice Barrier, under the most trying conditions, 

 without a day's sickness. How many other men, one 

 wonders, could thus leave a kindly climate and the com- 

 parative ease of a laboratory and turn themselves into 

 explorers, braving the worst climate in the world, at an 

 age when many are thinking of ease and comfort ? 



Sir Edgeworth David is a Welshman who has for thirty- 

 nine years occupied the Chair of Geology at Sydney 

 University, New South Wales. He is an acknowledged 

 world-authority on dynamical geology, glaciation, and 

 other branches of Science which sound fearsome, though 

 really they are enthralling, for they deal with the earth 

 and its minerals, climate, and the changes which have 

 occurred in the earth's long history. 



It was in 1908 that Professor Edgeworth David 

 accepted an invitation from Sir Ernest Shackleton, who 

 was forming a new expedition to the Antarctic, to accom- 

 pany his ship, the Nimrod, as far as winter quarters at 

 the Great Ice Barrier, so that he might there ' on the 

 spot ' give the expedition the benefit of his advice before 

 returning to Australia, after shore-parties and supplies 

 had been unloaded. With him were two brilliant young 

 scientists, Douglas Mawson, now famous in the annals 

 of exploration, but then a young man of twenty-eight 

 years of age, beginning his distinguished career as an 

 explorer, and Leo Cotton, aged thirty. Cotton was to 



