a summer living, as it were, upon sufferance, in the
middle of one of the largest penguin rookeries in the world. He has
described the story of their crowded life with a humour with which,
perhaps, we hardly credited him, and with a simplicity which many writers
of children's stories might envy. If you think your own life hard, and
would like to leave it for a short hour I recommend you to beg, borrow or
steal this tale, and read and see how the penguins live. It is all quite
true.

So there is already a considerable literature about the expedition, but
no connected account of it as a whole. Scott's diary, had he lived, would
merely have formed the basis of the book he would have written. As his
personal diary it has an interest which no other book could have had. But
a diary in this life is one of the only ways in which a man can blow off
steam, and so it is that Scott's book accentuates the depression which
used to come over him sometimes.

We have seen the importance which must attach to the proper record of
improvements, weights and methods of each and every expedition. We have
seen how Scott took the system developed by the Arctic Explorers at the
point of development to which it had been brought by Nansen, and applied
it for the first time to Antarctic sledge travelling. Scott's Voyage of
the Discovery gives a vivid picture of mistakes rectified, and of
improvements of every kind. Shackleton applied the knowledge they gained
in his first expedition, Scott in this, his second and last. On the whole
I believe this expedition was the best equipped there has ever been, when
the double purpose, exploratory and scientific, for which it was
organized, is taken into consideration. It is comparatively easy to put
all your eggs into one basket, to organize your material and to equip and
choose your men entirely for one object, whether it be the attainment of
the Pole, or the running of a perfect series of scientific observations.
Your difficulties increase many-fold directly you combine the one with
the other, as was done in this case. Neither Scott nor the men with him
would have gone for the Pole alone. Yet they considered the Pole to be an
achievement worthy of a great attempt, and "We took risks, we knew we
took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no
cause for complaint...."

It is, it must be, of the first importance that a system, I will not say
perfected, but developed, to a pitch of high