262 
SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION [May 
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 discomfort 
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 physicists' 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. Con- 
stantly 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, fee, 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 picturesqucness — 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 
