he tide crack; Clissold was left on the snow
whilst the team disappeared in the distance. Noogis returned later,
having eaten through his harness, and the others were eventually found
some two miles away, 'foul' of an ice hummock. Yesterday Clissold
took the same team to Cape Royds; they brought back a load of 100
lbs. a dog in about two hours. It would have been a good performance
for the best dogs in the time, and considering that Meares pronounced
these two dogs useless, Clissold deserves a great deal of credit.

Yesterday we had a really successful balloon ascent: the balloon ran
out four miles of thread before it was released, and the instrument
fell without a parachute. The searchers followed the clue about 2 1/2
miles to the north, when it turned and came back parallel to itself,
and only about 30 yards distant from it. The instrument was found
undamaged and with the record properly scratched.

Nelson has been out a good deal more of late. He has got a good little
run of serial temperatures with water samples, and however meagre
his results, they may be counted as exceedingly accurate; his methods
include the great scientific care which is now considered necessary
for this work, and one realises that he is one of the few people who
have been trained in it. Yesterday he got his first net haul from
the bottom, with the assistance of Atkinson and Cherry-Garrard.

Atkinson has some personal interest in the work. He has been
getting remarkable results himself and has discovered a host of new
parasites in the seals; he has been trying to correlate these with
like discoveries in the fishes, in hope of working out complete life
histories in both primary and secondary hosts.

But the joint hosts of the fishes may be the mollusca or other
creatures on which they feed, and hence the new fields for Atkinson
in Nelson's catches. There is a relative simplicity in the round of
life in its higher forms in these regions that would seem especially
hopeful for the parasitologist.

My afternoon walk has become a pleasure; everything is beautiful in
this half light and the northern sky grows redder as the light wanes.

_Tuesday, August_ 15.--The instrument recovered from the balloon shows
an ascent of 2 1/2 miles, and the temperature at that height only 5 deg.
or 6 deg. C. below that at the surface. If, as one must suppose, this
layer extends over the Barrier, it would there be at a considerably
higher temperature than the surf