288 
SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION 
night we had some excellent thick seal soup, very much 
like thick hare soup ; this was followed by an equally 
tasty seal steak and kidney pie and a fruit jelly. The 
smell of frying greeted us on awaking this morning, and at 
breakfast each of us had two of our nutty little Notothenia 
fish after our bowl of porridge. These little fish have 
an extraordinarily sweet taste — bread and butter and 
marmalade finished the meal. At the midday meal we 
had bread and butter, cheese, and cake, and to-night I 
smell mutton in the preparation. Under the circumstances 
it would be difficult to conceive more appetising repasts 
or a regime which is less likely to produce scorbutic 
symptoms. I cannot think we shall get scurvy. 
Nelson lectured to us to-night, giving a very able little 
elementary sketch of the objects of the biologist. A fact 
struck one in his explanation of the rates of elimination. 
Two of the offspring of two parents alone survive, speaking 
broadly; this the same of the human species or the 
6 ling,' with 24,000,000 eggs in the roe of each female ! 
He talked much of evolution, adaptation, &c. Mendelism 
became the most debated point of the discussion ; the 
transmission of characters has a wonderful fascination 
for the human mind. There was also a point striking deep 
in the debate on Professor Loeb's experiments with sea 
urchins ; how far had he succeeded in reproducing the 
species without the male spermatozoa ? Not very far, it 
seemed, when all was said. 
A theme for a pen would be the expansion of interest 
Polar affairs ; compare the interests of a winter spent 
