comes, and the swell rises, and breaks that
ice-floe off; and away they go in the blinding drift to join the main
pack-ice, with a private yacht all to themselves.

You must agree that a bird like this is an interesting beast, and when,
seven months ago, we rowed a boat under those great black cliffs,[157]
and found a disconsolate Emperor chick still in the down, we knew
definitely why the Emperor has to nest in mid-winter. For if a June egg
was still without feathers in the beginning of January, the same egg
laid in the summer would leave its produce without practical covering for
the following winter. Thus the Emperor penguin is compelled to undertake
all kinds of hardships because his children insist on developing so
slowly, very much as we are tied in our human relationships for the same
reason. It is of interest that such a primitive bird should have so long
a childhood.

But interesting as the life history of these birds must be, we had not
travelled for three weeks to see them sitting on their eggs. We wanted
the embryos, and we wanted them as young as possible, and fresh and
unfrozen that specialists at home might cut them into microscopic
sections and learn from them the previous history of birds throughout the
evolutionary ages. And so Bill and Birdie rapidly collected five eggs,
which we hoped to carry safely in our fur mitts to our igloo upon Mount
Terror, where we could pickle them in the alcohol we had brought for the
purpose. We also wanted oil for our blubber stove, and they killed and
skinned three birds--an Emperor weighs up to 61/2 stones.

The Ross Sea was frozen over, and there were no seal in sight. There were
only 100 Emperors as compared with 2000 in 1902 and 1903. Bill reckoned
that every fourth or fifth bird had an egg, but this was only a rough
estimate, for we did not want to disturb them unnecessarily. It is a
mystery why there should have been so few birds, but it certainly looked
as though the ice had not formed very long. Were these the first
arrivals? Had a previous rookery been blown out to sea and was this the
beginning of a second attempt? Is this bay of sea-ice becoming unsafe?

Those who previously discovered the Emperors with their chicks saw the
penguins nursing dead and frozen chicks if they were unable to obtain a
live one. They also found decomposed eggs which they must have incubated
after they had been frozen. Now we found that these birds were so anxious
to sit on someth