nt our parties can pull on ski. The
young ice troubles of April and May have passed away. It is curious
that circumstances caused us to miss them altogether during our stay
in the _Discovery._

We are living extraordinarily well. At dinner last 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 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 '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 in polar affairs;
compare the interests of a winter spent by the old Arctic voyagers
with our own, and look into the causes. The aspect of everything
changes as our knowledge expands.

The expansion of human interest in rude surroundings may perhaps
best be illustrated by comparisons. It will serve to recall such a
simple case as the fact that our ancestors applied the terms horrid,
frightful, to mountain crags which in our own day are more justly
admired as lofty, grand, and beautiful.

The poetic conception of this natural phenomenon has followed not so
much an inherent change of sentiment as the intimacy of wider knowledge
and the death of superstitious influence. One is much struck