their preserves. What I do not relish is the thought of walking inadvertently on top of a sea-lion as he lies in a cleft of the rocks, or, worse still, on a tussac bog.

Nature has done her best to supply the deficiency of trees with the tussac-g -grass. This grows in large clumps on a stool, locally called a bog, which may be four feet high, the grass rising perhaps another six or eight feet. One can penetrate tussac by dodging between the bogs, but one cannot see a foot before one. If the lion is lying on the top of the bog, as is his habit, one may come face to face with him at any moment. These creatures are the curse of the country; they ought to be shot, boiled down, or otherwise disposed of. Not only do they spoil the tussac, which is a most valuable feed and threatened with extinction, but they eat up all the fish and anything else they can get, and they annoy the fur seals. Yet one is not allowed to kill them, perhaps because unless a careful watch was kept a good many fur seals would get killed by mistake, and fur seals are very strictly protected.

In consequence of the protection the fur seals are increasing rapidly, at any rate in the rookery I visited. On this one little rock there were some two thousand pups-postulating the same number of cows, who were all away fishingand over a hundred wigs," old bulls who were supposed to be looking after the children,

preventing them from straying or falling into the sea, but were not performing their duty very conscientiously. For with these animals the mating season follows immediately on the birth of the pup, and the wigs were fighting to secure a place on which to collect their harem of twenty or thirty wives. The unfortunate pups got kicked out of the way in all directions. They do not seem to mind falling about on the rocks-all seals appear to be as indestructible as india-rubber; but it must be a troublesome job for their mothers to find them again, and a good many must get drowned. Young seals have to be made to swallow stones before they take to the water, otherwise they go down by the head; indeed, many authorities say that no seal can swim without ballast. But others say they use the stones to knock off intestinal worms. I am not an authority, merely a transcriber of stories I have heard from those who are.

I

The fur seals have the most charming babies I know; their mothers are matchless for grace in the water, and by no means lacking in that quality on the rocks. Of the bulls, the young bachelors, I saw nothing. did not wonder at their discretion when I saw those hideous old "wigs" watching for any possible competitors in the marriage market. At the best of times they are no beauties, but after their battles they were a shocking sight, and all the island was running with their blood. It was a hot day, and

The other distinctive fowl of these parts are the penguins. To visit them I crossed a pleasantly prosperous farm. Stanley might be on one of those deplorable lochs in North Uist, but West Point Island might lie off the coast of Cork. A warm current in the sea, a more kindly soil, and more careful farming give the west quite a different aspect.

I went, it seemed, a prodigious way up the hill on this side, and a very short way down on the other; I do not know how many hundred feet above the sea I was when I came to the edge of the cliff and found the penguins there, of all places. Not only grown birds, but eggs, and chickens, who would grow as big as their parents, and presumably require just as much food before they were fledged. Here was a twofold problem laid before me. One part: why do the Rockhopper penguins make their rookery at the top of a cliff? The other: how do they get up there, themselves, their dinners, and the dinners of their children? On the first question the authorities are divided, some maintaining that the rookery was originally on a flat rock near the sea, and that later upheavals, landslips, and other modifications of the form of the earth have left it on a steep rock far away from the sea, the penguins, the most conservative of birds, declining to shift for such trivial geological processes. The other school maintains maintains that they

they can manage so that seals shall not follow and eat them. But I should put my money on the seal.

On the second question the authorities are not helpful; they merely assert that the birds do breed and feed there, supposing that fish descend like manna for their benefit. I venture to advance a theory. Adjoining the penguin rookery you will find a rookery of mollymawks, and many of the latter standing like sentries among the penguins. They do not do this for pleasure; penguins are a quarrelsome, noisy, and rather dirty folk, while the molly is a dignified old gentleman. He may be he is six feet across the wings, and can point his arguments with a beak a foot long. But he cannot catch fish as well as the penguin. I suggest that the latter contracts to supply him on condition that a certain percentage is delivered at the rookery. Whether this be true or not, he does the penguin one good turn: he keeps that inveterate robber, the skua gull, away; and I suppose is paid something on that account.

All penguins display very bad manners in the family circle, but most of them treat larger animals like men and mollymawks civilly enough. The ringed penguin of Anvers Island, another rock-dweller, was particularly friendly. He used a formidable enough beak on his own species, but only responded to my advances by beating my fingers with his

flippers, his equivalent, I suppose, for shaking hands. But I saw him knocking an obstreperous youngster sprawling with a blow of his-what shall I call them ?-arms, forelegs, flippers? They serve all purposes at need.

You cannot make free with all penguins, however. There is a surly solitary bird that lives in a burrow and brays like an ass. He bites.

These cliff-dwellers, though no mean climbers, are poor pedestrians. There is one species to which a two-mile walk is a trifle. They lay their eggs on the open hillside. I do not say they build; their nests are never finished, for as soon as a few sticks are collected they all start stealing from each other; meanwhile the hens do their business where and how they can. A procession of these birds, marching solemnly in single file along their smooth-beaten road, is quite imposing; not so if they get off into the rough, for their legs are so short that they trip over roots and stones, and, if you hurry them, scuttle away on all-fours. Another species,

wanting to cross a snow-clad ice-floe, makes no attempt to walk.

He falls prone, and sculls himself along on his stomach. And the ringed penguin had a delightful game. He had made a trough, a sort of toboggan run, down a snow slope that finished on top of a fifty-foot sea cliff; down this he slid and plunged head first into the water. The pioneers must have hit a good many rocks before the run was fast enough to shoot them clear; but you can't hurt a penguin any more than you can a seal.

It may be wondered how I saw ice-floes and snow-slopes in the Falkland Islands, where frost is rare, and fuchsias luxuriate in the open. Included in the Government of Stanley are over three million square miles of the Antarctic continent and its adjacent islands. But the people of the Falklands, jealous of the reputation of their climate, do not regard these southern lands as part of their country, but relegate them to the inferior status of dependencies. I thought the objection was frivolous, and went to see the southern lands for myself.

Again I found myself a passenger, travelling two hundred miles a day towards the South Pole. I take fine weather as it comes, and am thankful; but the dwellers in cold and stormy Stanley were surprised at finding themselves sitting in deck-chairs on the bridge

as we crossed the sixtieth parallel. I see now how I got foul of snow in the Pacific; I did not go far enough south.

We had raised the outlying of the South Shetlands before we sighted anything of interest. First, whales; of these we took particular note, for we were

Day was just breaking as we hauled in for our first port, Deception Island. We seemed to be heading for an unbroken wall of rock a thousand feet high when all of a sudden the entrance disclosed itself. Between the vertical cliff to starboard and the steep hillside to port lies a quarter of a mile of water, but a mid-channel shoal constricts the fairway to a cable's length. Our passage of this was disputed by a small iceberg going in and a whalecatcher going out; we kept so close to the side that one imagined a stone might fall on our decks from the crumbling rocks which hung over our heads.

The place is of an incredibly ferocious aspect, doubly so in that cold and windy twilight, when the red pinnacles of lava looked as dark as the heaps of black volcanic sand which protruded from the base of the snows. But a short passage through the breach in the crater wall opened up a vast harbour in which was quite a little town. There were seven great steamers moored along the beach, smoke rising from a factory on shore,

Considering that thirty or forty whales may be dealt with here in a day, the place was surprisingly little offensive. But every part of the animal is used, except the whalebone. (Fortunately every part does not go into the boilers; some comes to the dinner-table in the form of the tastiest fillet steak I have met since leaving Dublin.) The residual matterbut the technology is uninteresting.

A slight improvement in the weather tempted us to see the sights. Deception is a crater with the bottom fallen out; it is still sufficiently active to emit hot sulphurous gases and boiling water, quite enough to demoralise any weather in that latitude, for the average shade temperature was little above freezing. At any rate, whenever I saw it, Deception was under a cloud.

The harbour-the crater lake -has a coast line of some fifteen miles. This we circumnavigated in a launch. It is somewhat irregular in shape, for here and there glaciers have pushed heaps of moraine into the water. These glaciers are most instructive. They are very small, but passing over (and under, and through) loose gravels they produce a tremen

dous effect on the form of the land. It is impossible to tell where ice underlies the piles of rubbish, and where is dry moraine, till the whole comes down to the water's edge, and is there exposed in section. Here the two materials are strangely intermingled. The ice is banded with lines of sand, in one place swelling in lenticular masses, in another dying out, and everywhere highly contorted, looking for all the world like a cliff of gneiss. When the glacial period closes, what strange patterns will be formed by the residual sands; what a puzzle to those who have not seen them in the making! An interesting island to the geologist, but fearfully depressing as a spectacle. Round the gloomy lake stand as it were vast pithead banks, varied by patches of dirty snow, all black-and-white except where some reddish spikes stand out like ruined engine-houses built of cheap brick. You cannot see the clean snows of the heights, you cannot see blue sky; a canopy of cloud presses down. You cannot look out on sunlight and colour, the breach in the prison walls is too narrow. It is the abomination of ugliness.

Such are all recently volcanic districts; but the whole of the Dependency is not so new, for it comprises Graham Land and all that part of Antarctica as far as the South Pole. In this direction we continued, followed out of harbour by the customary snowstorm. But as

we approached the limit of the cloud-cap that grows like a mushroom out of Deception, an amazing vision leaped into the broadening belt of blue sky that lay along the horizon, a pile of frozen clouds, borrowing all his delicate tints from the lately-risen sun. On the charts it is given a position and the name of Smith Island, but I do not believe it to be real; it is like nothing earthly. Every fine day-and all days were fine-while we were in these waters that wonderful apparition hung in the sky over us ; and it was the last, as well as the first, sight we had of things very much better than the South Shetlands.

For we were going to pass through Belgica Straits, between Graham Land and the Palmer Archipelago, and there is nothing in the world more beautiful than the mountains that border that passage. Here at sea-level in the Antarctic one gets atmospheric effects unknown at the greater heights from which one sees the Alps (I maintain that in Switzerland one should be blindfolded till one is nine thousand feet up); and I shall always think the latter crude in colour and harsh in line after the soft shades of the Solvay Range and the golden light of Graham Land.

And there was ice, floating in, reflected in, the glassy water; ahead and to starboard dazzling white on a pool of bright blue; to port and astern pale green against a sea of cream; some bergs square,