The Soil& ,Polt
THE size and weight of the books publiShed on South'Polar exploration may be ,taken as symbolical of the vastness of Antarctica, most, of which, though " discovered,'.' is as yet nnexplored._ At all events, the physical magnitude of Mr. Gordon Hayes's treatise on the Southern Continent is equal to that of the books which were the immediate product of the- famthia eXplorations' of Scott, Shacldeton, and Sir bouglas Mawson. Our first thought was that it was pre; the heroic form, but we were entirely wrong. A hook soil' as Mr. Hayes has :written was needed, and here it is. He has marshalled all the principal results of` the various expeditions, and by descriptions, maps, and Photographs has made us feel that we are almost as familiar with Antarctica as we are with Australia or Arabia. lie has done his work superlatively well. The book is written with extreme care and in a scholarly,_ scientific spirit, though as far as possible scientific phrases -as avoided. It is a book for bothlearned and simple. - 1 We say that thkbook was needed because; though public interest in the Aptarctic has been Steadily growing,' Dr., H. 4.- Mill, in his excellent Siege of the South' Pole, ended with the expedition of the- DisceVery ' in 1902-04, and he did net describe Antarctica. Although most people know that the Antarctic is colder than the Arctic, probably few people carry in their minds a picture of the vast differences between the two. Everything in the Antarctic is, as it were, in cold storage ; only for a very short time in the least cold parts of the Antarctic does the temperature rise above freezing point. The result is that land flora and fauna are practically non-existent. In the Arctic} bears, oxen, foxes, hares, and other mammals flourish,7, and -so do grasses, shrubsk-and--flowers. Antarctic is quite sterile by comparison, but the oftener explorers return to it the more they are impressed. The .great silence which spreads over the ` vast and godlike -spaces " has a Subduing grandeui, and there fs no part of the world, It is sgid, where colour is more delicate yet mor'4, intense. The long straight lines of the ice barriers, judged by ordinary standards, ought to be monotonous, but evidently they are very far from being so. For one thing, they never. seem to be straight, because the perspective saves them.
Sir Douglas Mawson rightly called Antarctica the " home of the blizzard." The winds have a higher sustained force than in any place where winds have been measured, and in recent years it has come to be understood that the South Polar weather is by no means a wind-tight compartment but affects_ the weather elsewhere at great distances, and to _some extent :perhaps all over the world. The improvement in Feather forecasting in Britain has been one of the achieve- ments of our generation, This is due to wireless messages about conditions in the Atlantic, whence most of our weather ..ciocines but it will be impossible to have really accurate or lOng-range forecasts till. meteorological stations are estab- Aiihed in ail countries, including Antarctica. Mr: R. E. Priestley thinks that the, weather in the Antarctic probably affects the nearest inhabited countries between six ' months and a year later.
One compensation of the intense cold in Antarctica is that disease is almost impossible. There are no germs. When we turn from the land to the water, however, we find a vast change. Marine fauna and flora—the latter mostly mosses and. lichens—are , plentifid.,. .The sea-leopardi- prey on the penguins, the seals on the fish, the killer-whale on the seals and so on. Every creature is being hunted even while it hunts. " Eat or be eaten " is the rule of life. Mr. James is quoted as saying that nearly every seal which is killed has scars on the skin, most of them presumably made by killer-whales.
..Mr. Hayes's general review of the geographical conquests sows that Wilkes placed land where it certainly does not exist. It was Ras who discovered the Continent and the edge- of his Barrier, though he explored nothing in detail. *cat traversed the surface of the Barrier and made other discoveries by land and sea. Shaddeton explored still more. Amundsen, who reached the South Pole, went further, or course,_ but he travelled _at such speed that his scientific results were sketchy: Mr. Hayes says that Sir Douglas Mawson adopted the true mean between Amundsen's exten- siveness and Scott's intensiveness, for he ranged widely but observed with accuracy. Amundsen was a master of dog- crsft and Sir Douglas Mawson imitated him in his relianee on dogii. Sir Douglas Mawson, whom-Mr. Hayes evidently regards as having had the largest share of the all-round • • 4- qualities necessary for a leader, is not a seaman.
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