12 DISCOVERY REPORTS 



arctica). The extent to which this correlation can be regarded as significant will doubtless 

 appear when Mr Eraser's results are pubhshed. 



The more important part of the area dealt with in this paper is known to the Nor- 

 wegian whalers as the West Antarctic, comprising South Georgia and adjacent waters 

 from about the longitude of the South Sandwich Islands in the east to the South 

 Shetlands in the west. Whaling is also carried out in Bransfield Strait between the South 

 Shetlands and Graham Land, and the collections from three plankton surveys in this 

 area are described. Modern whaling has been carried out in the Dependencies of the 

 Falkland Islands since 1904, and in recent years has spread to the ice-edge and far to 

 the east — to Enderby Land and even beyond. 



In addition to the results obtained within the Antarctic Zone mention is made of 

 work carried out in more northerly waters, particularly collections showing the transi- 

 tion from Antarctic to sub- Antarctic phytoplankton. On the homeward passage at the 

 end of her first commission the R.R.S. ' Discovery II ' worked a line of stations from a 

 point to the north-east of the South Sandwich Islands along the thirtieth meridian right 

 up to 14!° N lat. This line passed through all the types of surface water met with in the 

 South-west Atlantic, and opportunity has been taken to describe the phytoplankton 

 material then collected, by way of introduction to the more detailed account of the 

 southerly region of economic importance. Incidentally this material also affords a good 

 illustration of the close relation existing between the character of the phytoplankton, 

 and the major hydrological features of the surface water. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 



With the exception of the paper by Hardy and Guntheri on plankton mainly from 

 South Georgia, previous work on the Antarctic phytoplankton has been almost entirely 

 of a systematic nature. The works which have been found of most value are Karsten's 

 account of the material collected (to the east) by the ' Valdivia ', Mangin's accounts of 

 the material brought back by the 'Pourquoi Pas?' and the 'Scotia', and Van Heurck's 

 report on the Belgica collections. Of these Van Heurck's and Karsten's are almost 

 purely systematic accounts, though the latter contains some illuminating extracts from 

 Schimper's field notebook. Mangin makes a notable eff"ort to determine the leading 

 forms and to give an idea of the seasonal succession. The Pourquoi Pas? material was, 

 however, taken close in to the land for the most part, and probably for this reason our 

 results do not show so close an agreement with Mangin's findings as might have been 

 expected. These works are the principal sources of the identifications made in this 

 paper. The small amount of material from sub-tropical and tropical waters here dealt 

 with, has not been examined so thoroughly as that from the more important region 

 farther south. However, the identification of as many species as possible from the warm 

 seas has been attempted, the principal sources, in addition to Mangin, being the sections 

 by Paulsen and Gran (1908 and 1905) in Nordisches Plankton, and the works of Dr 



^ Discovery Reports, in press. 



