Neither rats nor mice had come north with us. Three of our useless carrier pigeons had reached winter quarters alive, fluttering round the ship and perching on the frozen rigging, but none survived long. It was in the depth of winter, when the land seemed utterly lifeless and deserted, that the first living inhabitant of Floeberg Beach presented himself on board our ship. Midnight was past, and one officer alone lingered beside the main-deck stove, watching the red light flickering on a much-weathered musk ox skull that had been picked up on shore and was now being dried before the fire. Suddenly he falls on his knees and stares intently at the bone, then rushes to the naturalist’s cabin, and reappears with that gentleman lightly clad in scarlet flannel, and bearing the first bottles and specimen boxes that came to hand. A little black spider, revived by the warmth, had crept out of a small hole in the skull, but retreated again before he could be bottled. Two weary hours elapsed ere he reappeared, but the watchers were at length rewarded, and he was triumphantly captured, packed away, dated, and labelled in the naturalist’s store, commonly known as “South Kensington.” At that time we had an unreasoning impression that no live thing could endure actual reduction to the temperatures of Arctic night. But cold is by no means so deadly. The mosquitoes, butterflies, and dragon-flies of brief Arctic summer are assuredly not all new arrivals. A good example of vitality in the vegetable kingdom was afforded by the wheat left at “Hall’s Rest” by the ill-fated “Polaris.” In spite of the cold of five winters, it was still alive when we found it. Sown at Discovery Bay, it germinated freely, and, as I write, some of it carried home with the ships promises to reproduce itself in a fair crop of bearded “Polaris wheat.” Even at the Polar Sea, and in the midnight of winter, the air holds spores of moulds, and many of them grew rapidly when carried into the warmth inside the ship. It is hard to say what temperatures would kill such primitive organisms—in fact, so far as our little experience goes, Sir William Thomson’s “moss-grown fragment of another world” might have carried the germ of terrestrial life safely enough through the chills of stellar space. The temperature of winter was by no means steady; on the contrary, its progressive fall was interrupted by many sudden rises. In ordinary cold weather the sky was wonderfully clear, and the weather wonderfully calm. Many a time, as we walked at daily exercise up and down our half-mile of shadowy snow, with nothing to look at but the stars, the whole sky was absolutely vapourless, from the pole star in the zenith to Orion or the three stars of Aquila just skirting along the horizon. Sometimes a faint fleecy mist, hardly distinguishable from one of our feeble auroras, would pass overhead; but round piled-up masses of cloud, such as are common in southern skies, were never seen.