ANTARCTIC. 'HISTORY.* . .• .
IT is impossible in the limits of a single notice to do more than draw attention to the main features,of this monumental work, which sums up in six volumes, printed:and illustrated hi a manner worthy of their subject, the:work of the natural- ists who accompanied Captain Scott on the voyage. of the ' Discovery' to the Antarctic regional/11901-1904. Suffice it to say that the British Museum has followed up.the work of the Expedition in a manner which perhaps would -have been impossible for any other institution in the world, and that these six volumes represent the patient investigation of the highest authority at the Museum's disposal. It may be useful at the outset to indicate the ground .covered by the different volumes. The first is devoted to geology ; the second mainly to the report of Dr. E. A. Wilson upon the mammals and birds,•partieularly the penguins.; the third to invertebrates, alga), and mosses ; the fourth. to invertebrates; the fifth to reports upon animals, the embryology of seals in particular, and upon lichens; and the-sixth to summaries and
general notices, and a paper upon freshwater algae.' •
It is the second volume which Will probably attract the most general interest. In it Dr. E. A. Wilson publishes the result of his observations of Weddell'e seal, the sea-leopard, the crab eating seal, Ross's seal, the sea-elephant, and Hooker's sea-lion; and of the rookeries of Emperor penguins and Adolie penguins, which provided particularly strenuous employment for several members of the ship's company. Captain Scott's expedition was the first to discover a nesting colony of the Emperor penguin, and the sixty odd pages, illustrated with sketches and photographs, which deal with the penguins are, perhaps, the most fascinating in allthe book. Dr. Wilson did not succeed in doing all that he wished; he did not get to the breeding grounds in time for the actual laying of the eggs; but he was able to make a study of the natural history of penguins sufficiently exhaustive to bring him to the conclusion that the Emperor penguin is a bird of quite extraordinary interest, which may-eventually be found to be the nearest type to the primitive bird form of (eons past. The existence of the Emperor penguin to-day is a series of riddles. Here we have " a bird which not only cannot fly, and lives on. fish which it catches by pursuit under water, but which never stops on land or on land ice even to breed, and has so *modified its habits that it carries out the whole process of incubation on sea-ice, choosing those months of the Antarctic • year when the greatest cold ensures a solidity of ewe-ice 'which can be trusted." .In fact, the Emperor pengbiti 'appears- to have decided that the race shall be propagated. under conditions which shall ensure the :greatest• chance of : extermination. For breeding grounds they choose stretches- of "sea-ice under ice-cliffs which are so much undermined Lind so unstable that, in Dr. Wilson's words, " no man in his senses would camp for a single night under them:" Yet, the Emperor .penguins huddle under the' cliffs for five • months in the year. The eggs are laid in midWinter, when the Polar ',regions are in complete darkness for months, an&-frequently, owing to shif tinge and falls of ice, the eggs arebrok-envor -the young birds killed or frozen to death. At a .itestilii'Of these loSaee, er possibly in pursuance of BOMA myeterious staturallaw, there is in a breeding colony a proportion of•- only ' one young penguin to ten or twelve full-grown birds, Nor are the young birds cared for only by their parents. All the full-grown pen- gains take it in turn to nurse the eggs and-the.: young birds. They make no nest---iudeed, it would he impossible to. make. a nest on a bare ice-floe. Instead, the parent bird when the egg is laid: nurses it on her feet, standing over it...in an upright position, so that the egg lies against a:hare-pitch of skin on the abdomen, and is covered by a'.10,:nie flap of Skin and feathers. This in the case of the King.,pengida has been described •• wrongly by other. writere, aara " pouelV and the penguin has been said to "pouch "..its.eggein order to hatch them. Neither the King. penguin .nor the Emperor penguin has a pouch of any. kind—merely a flap or lappet which falls over the egg. and keeps it from.exposureto,the gold. To. be able.to nurae.an egg or a..chick at the breeding season of the
' s'Eetional Antarctic Expedition, Natural itiotnry. Ordered to ha printed by the Trustees or the British Museum,, Vol.1., " Geology" (41 Ws.);
ii., "Zoology" (Z3) • "Zoology and Botany" (t 10s.) ; iv., " Zoology " (t1 15a.); v., " ZoolOgy.Lid Botany "(R1 10s.) ; ti., " Zoology end Botany " (16o.) 6 vols., £11 Is.
year is the great object in the life of Emperor penguins, both male and female. They wait round *the penguin who is so lucky as to have a chick under its feathers, and when the penguin is hungry, and leaves the chick, all the penguins standing near scramble to get it for themselves. Dr. Wilson compares the scramble to a football scrimmage, and he noticed that the wretohed little bird was often badly hurt by its excited nurses, each of which tried to push the baby between its legs with its pointed beak. Sometimes a chick falls down a crevice, and the nurses fight on the ice above it while it freezes to death. Sometimes the little creature even tries to escape from its nurses, and hides, shivering, under a ledge of ice. Often it is scratched and torn, and many chicks die in the process. The death-rate is actually as high as seventy-seven per cent., and the question naturally arises, whether the breed may not be dying out. However, Dr. Wilson thinks that this is not the case, and he suggests that the low percentage of living chicks may be compensated for by the fact that the Emperor penguin is a long-lived bird. Altogether, the problems in- volved in the life-history of the Emperor penguin are so baffling that it is not to be wondered at that a naturalist with Dr. Wilson's courage and persistence should desire to solve them at the greatest risk and in the face of almost insuperable difficulties. But do we, even from the following
passage, realize quite what the risk and difficulties mean P Hero is Dr. Wilson's estimate of the work that would be required to be done by an expedition which should set out to get a series of eggs in various stages of incubation so as to work out the embryology—a matter, Dr. Wilson considers, of the highest importance :-
" It would at any time require that a party of three at least, with full camp equipment, should traverse about a hundred miles of the Barrier surface in the dark and should, by moonlight, cross over with rope and axe the immense pressure ridges which form a chaos of crevices at Cape Crozier. These ridges, moreover, which have taken a party as much as two hours of careful work to cross by daylight, must be crossed and recrossed at every visit to the breeding site in the bay. There is no possibility even by day- light of conveying over them the sledge or camping kit, and in the darkness of midwinter the impracticability is still more obvious. Cape Crozier is a focus for wind and storm, where every breath is converted by the configuration of Mounts Erebus and Terror into a regular drifting blizzard full of snow. It is here, as I have already stated, that on one journey or another we have had to lie patiently in sodden sleeping-bags for as many as five and seven days on end, waiting for the weather to change and make it possible for us to leave our tents at all. If, however, these dangers were overcome there would still be the difficulty of making the needful preparations from the eggs. The party would have to be on the scene at any rate early in July. Supposing that no eggs were found upon arrival, it would be well to spend the time in labelling the most likely birds—those, for example, that have taken up their stations close underneath the ice-cliffs. And if this were done it would be easier then to examine them daily by the moonlight, if it and the weather generally wore suitable ; conditions, I must confess, not always easily obtained at Cape Crozier. But if by good luck things happened to go well, it would by this time be useful to have a shelter built of snow blocks on the sea-ice in which to work with the cooking lamp to prevent the freezing of the egg before the embryo was out out and in order that fluid solutions might be handy for the various stages of its preparation ; for it must be borne in mind that the temperature all the while may be any- thing between zero and 50 deg. F. The whole work no doubt would be full of difficulty, but it would not be quite impossible.* Having read this passage, written after the return of the ' Discovery' in 1904, we may turn to a passage in a letter
printed in the Times of May 16th, 1912, in which Dr. Wilson, writing to Sir Archibald Geikie from the headquarters of the
British Antarctic Expedition under the date October 31st, 1911, thus refers to the work in which be is at this moment engaged:— " My own effort in midwinter to get to the Emperor penguins at a time when their eggs would provide embryos fit for cutting turned out to be exceedingly difficult, but we succeeded in getting throe different stages back, which, I think, will prove to be of some interest. We shall make the rookery another visit next spring. We find they lay their eggs actually before midwinter's day, even earlier than we thought.'
The whole work, then, has proved " not quite impossible "; Dr. Wilson meant that it should so prove.
In an illuminating comment upon the biological memoirs contained in thette six volumes Professor Jeffrey Bell sums up the main differences between the fauna of the North and the South Polar regions. There are, so far as is known, no land mammals belonging to the South Pole. In the
Arctic regions the savage carnivores have compelled all the defenceless creatures to assume the same colour as themselves and the snow. In the Antarctic the penguins have no enemies, and consequently are able to wear bright colours; the Emperor penguin has a splendid splash of orange on his neck and a rose line under his beak. The Antarctic region, again, which with the severity of its climate might be supposed to be devoid of life, teems with species of which 227 new forms are described in these six volumes. One of the most interesting of these new forms is the ten-legged pycnogonid, or sea-spiden, found by Mr. Hodgson. Of this discovery Professor Bell remarks drily that "it was a curious illustration of the lacunae knowledge of zoologists that it was some time before a person was found who knew that a ten-legged sea-spider had been discovered many years ago by Mr. Eights, and described by him under the quite unintelligible name of Decolopoda." But naming a new species is always a problem. In the first place, is it n, new species P Professor Bell, referring to the collection of Antarctic echinoderms which was placed in his hands for claseification, congratulates himself that he, and not another, was chosen for the work ; otherwise he trembles to think how many new species would have been created.
Previous page
