2 SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
The Antarctic problem has now crystallised into an 
object of scientific research, the results of which may 
indeed become practically useful, but in a manner too 
uncertain and remote to be a leading motive. Its solu- 
tion has been reduced to the result of exploration in the 
ice, and the final result will round out the knowledge of 
the globe into completeness and will leave no spot of 
Earth unknown. When the story of the Antarctic can be 
fully told T err a Incognita will cumber the map no more. 
At the dawn of geographical history an antarctic prob- 
lem was impossible because the Earth was viewed as a 
flat disc girdled by the Ocean River and bounded by 
darkness. Curiously enough the name became possible 
before the idea. When the early Greek students of the 
stars, looking out hour after hour and night after night 
on the wheeling vault overhead, classified the brightest 
