All day we have steamed westerly along the edge of the pack, passing very many icebergs and running through occasional streams of drift-ice. We have been looking for an opening into the ice offering us a passage southward, but we have found no promising break in the compact mass. Excepting the sunburst at noon it has been a dark, dull, gloomy day. A light fall of snow, mixed with a cold drizzling rain, has fallen over us almost constantly. This has again made the decks like a sliding pond. It is humorous, but also sorrowful, to see the men, whose clothing is sheeted with a plate of ice, stumble and glide and slip from rope to rope, always holding on to something to keep from spreading on the floor or glancing overboard into the icy waters. If one falls he swears and warms the cold air by heated language, but he is at once subdued by a companion, who says, “What! you complain of such little accidents, and you an explorer? No! that is the voice of a kitchen adventurer.” CHAPTER XIII ALONG THE EDGE OF THE PACK-ICE For the last few days we have had under discussion a striking peculiarity of the antarctic pack. It is a noticeable yellowness in the second sheets of newly broken pieces of ice. We saw this first in the ice close to Dancoland, and at this time most of us thought it due to earthy material from the neighbouring lands. But we have seen it to-day and we have seen it every day since we left this land now hundreds of miles eastward. Can it be earthy matter? In the laboratory there have been a number of experiments made. Almost every department claims the mysterious yellow as its special preserve, but all are at work either guessing or making painstaking experiments, or observations. The discussions grow quite heated. The navigating officers, with whom I coincided, held that it was earthy matter brought down upon the sea-ice by glacial streams. The fact that it is seen most close to the land, and only in patches in our present position, seems to bear out this fact; but the geologist, who is a chemist of ability, will not agree to this, and heaps upon us all sorts of mild humourous abuse. Arctowski has experiments in hand which he thinks will prove a chemical origin of the knotty yellow question. None of us are chemists, and of course we cannot dispute the theory of a chemical origin, but we hold fast to our first idea. The zoölogist would not venture a theory, but he said it belonged to his department, and we tried to talk him down also, but he would say little and took our unkindly jests goodnaturedly. Late in the afternoon Racovitza came out of his laboratory all aglow with good humour, but he heaped upon us of the majority, a stream of abuse which made us, for the time, abandon all theories. He has examined the yellow stuff carefully under the microscope and finds the ice literally alive with sea algæ, which prove to be the cause of the yellow colour. For a