skimmingly over the rippling surface of a pool, it excites nothing
but admiration. Its speed probably appears greater than it is, but
the ability to twist and turn and the general control of movement is
both beautiful and wonderful.

As one looks across the barren stretches of the pack, it is sometimes
difficult to realise what teeming life exists immediately beneath
its surface.

A tow-net is filled with diatoms in a very short space of time,
showing that the floating plant life is many times richer than that
of temperate or tropic seas. These diatoms mostly consist of three
or four well-known species. Feeding on these diatoms are countless
thousands of small shrimps (_Euphausia_); they can be seen swimming at
the edge of every floe and washing about on the overturned pieces. In
turn they afford food for creatures great and small: the crab-eater
or white seal, the penguins, the Antarctic and snowy petrel, and an
unknown number of fish.

These fish must be plentiful, as shown by our capture of one on an
overturned floe and the report of several seen two days ago by some men
leaning over the counter of the ship. These all exclaimed together,
and on inquiry all agreed that they had seen half a dozen or more a
foot or so in length swimming away under a floe. Seals and penguins
capture these fish, as also, doubtless, the skuas and the petrels.

Coming to the larger mammals, one occasionally sees the long lithe
sea leopard, formidably armed with ferocious teeth and doubtless
containing a penguin or two and perhaps a young crab-eating seal. The
killer whale (_Orca gladiator_), unappeasably voracious, devouring