So we see the balloons ascending under his guidance and anon he is away over the floe tracking the silk thread which held it.  Such a task completed, he is away to exercise his pony, and later out again with the dogs, the last typically self-suggested, because for the moment there is no one else to care for these animals.  Now in a similar manner he is spreading thermometer screens to get comparative readings with the home station.  He is for the open air, seemingly incapable of realising any discomfort from it, and yet his hours within doors spent with equal profit.  For he is intent on tracking the problems of sledging food and clothing to their innermost bearings and is becoming an authority on past records.  This will be no small help to me and one which others never could have given.

Adjacent to the physicist’s corner of the hut Atkinson is quietly pursuing the subject of parasites.  Already he is in a new world.  The laying out of the fish trap was his action and the catches are his field of labour.  Constantly he comes to ask if I would like to see some new form and I am taken to see some protozoa or ascidian isolated on the slide plate of his microscope.  The fishes themselves are comparatively new to science; it is strange that their parasites should have been under investigation so soon.

Atkinson’s bench with its array of microscopes, test-tubes, spirit lamps, &c., is next the dark room in which Ponting spends the greater part of his life.  I would describe him as sustained by artistic enthusiasm.  This world of ours is a different one to him than it is to the rest of us—­he gauges it by its picturesqueness—­his joy is to reproduce its pictures artistically, his grief to fail to do so.  No attitude could be happier for the work which he has undertaken, and one cannot doubt its productiveness.  I would not imply that he is out of sympathy with the works of others, which is far from being the case, but that his energies centre devotedly on the minutiae of his business.

Cherry-Garrard is another of the open-air, self-effacing, quiet workers; his whole heart is in the life, with profound eagerness to help everyone.  ’One has caught glimpses of him in tight places; sound all through and pretty hard also.’  Indoors he is editing our Polar journal, out of doors he is busy making trial stone huts and blubber stoves, primarily with a view to the winter journey to Cape Crozier, but incidentally these are instructive experiments for any party which may get into difficulty by being cut off from the home station.  It is very well to know how best to use the scant resources that nature provides in these regions.  In this connection I have been studying our Arctic library to get details concerning snow hut building and the implements used for it.

Oates’ whole heart is in the ponies.  He is really devoted to their care, and I believe will produce them in the best possible form for the sledging season.  Opening out the stores, installing a blubber stove, &c., has kept him busy, whilst his satellite, Anton, is ever at work in the stables—­an excellent little man.