1 82 SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION [May 



anon he is away over the floe tracking the silk thread which held 

 it. Such a task completed, he is away to exercise his pony, and 

 later out again with the dogs, the last typically self-suggested, 

 because for the moment there is no one else to care for these 

 animals. Now in a similar manner he is spreading thermometer 

 screens to get comparative readings with the home station. He 

 is for the open air, seemingly incapable of realising any dis- 

 comfort from it, and yet his hours within doors spent with 

 equal profit. For he is intent on tracking the problems 

 of sledging food and clothing to their innermost bearings 

 and is becoming an authority on past records. This will 

 be no small help to me and one which others never could have 

 given. 



Adjacent to the physicist's corner of the hut Atkinson is 

 quietly pursuing the subject of parasites. Already he is in a 

 new world. The laying out of the fish trap was his action 

 and the catches are his field of labour. Constantly he comes to 

 ask if I would like to see some new form and I am taken to 

 see some protozoa or ascidian isolated on the slide plate of 

 his microscope. The fishes themselves are comparatively new 

 to science; it is strange that their parasites should have been 

 under investigation so soon. 



Atkinson's bench with its array of microscopes, test-tubes, 

 spirit lamps, &c, is next the dark room in which Ponting spends 

 the greater part of his life. I would describe him as sustained 

 by artistic enthusiasm. This world of ours is a different one to 

 him than it is to the rest of us he gauges it by its picturesque- 

 ness his joy is to reproduce its pictures artistically, his grief to 

 fail to do so. No attitude could be happier for the work which 

 he has undertaken, and one cannot doubt its productiveness. 

 I would not imply that he is out of sympathy with the works 

 of others, which is far from being the case, but that his energies 

 centre devotedly on the minutiae of his business. 



Cherry-Garrard is another of the open-air, self-effacing, quiet 

 workers; his whole heart is in the life, with profound eagerness 

 to help everyone. ' One has caught glimpses of him in tight 

 places; sound all through and pretty hard also.' Indoors he 

 is editing our Polar journal, out of doors he is busy making 

 trial stone huts and blubber stoves, primarily with a view to 

 the winter journey to Cape Crozier, but incidentally these are 



