EECOMMENDS A CAPTIVE BALLOON 441 



appeal to the public — using Hooker's name if need be in stating 

 that without this instrument the Expedition might lose half 

 its means of accomplishing its end. 



With the fund thus raised, two small captive balloons and 

 their equipment were provided, which were duly used on the 

 Barrier. (See the * Voyage of the Discovery,' i. 197 seq.) 

 Thanks to the sympathy of the War Office, two officers and 

 three men of the Expedition had been trained for the work in 

 advance. 



The other point on which he specially dwelt in his remarks 

 at the Boyal Society was that the Antarctic offered endless 

 investigations to the naturalist, for the South Polar Ocean 

 swarms with animal and vegetable life. The large collections 

 made under Boss, i.e. chiefly by Hooker himself, had never 

 been examined, except the Diatoms. 



A better fate, I trust, awaits the treasures that the hoped- 

 for expedition will bring back, for so prolific is the ocean 

 that the naturalist need never be idle, no, not even for 

 one of the 24 hours of daylight during a whole Antarctic 

 summer, and I look to the results of a comparison of the 

 oceanic life of the Arctic and Antarctic regions as the herald- 

 ing of an epoch in the history of biology. 



His regrets over this stifling of scientific results were most 

 strongly expressed in a letter of January 10, 1901, to Dr. Bruce; 

 of the Scotia expedition, already quoted (see i. 56). 



Captain Scott set sail on the last day of July 1901. Sir 

 Joseph, accompanied by Lady Hooker and his youngest son 

 and their friend Dr. Smallpiece, had paid a farewell visit to 

 the Discovery on the previous day. When Scott returned 

 three years later, no one gave him warmer welcome than the 

 veteran explorer, to whom was brought a renewal and enlarge- 

 ment of the vision of the South which till but three years 

 before no living eye but his had seen. The photographs, so 

 much more adequate than the drawings he himself had brought 

 back, stirred his memories ; across the gap of sixty years he 

 recognised and named every point in the scenes shown to him, 

 and pronounced the most interesting fact for science to be the 



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