Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/20

14 very small specimens, representing three species, were secured, one of which proved to be new to science.

Of insect life we learned little, and our collections were unimportant. A few butterflies, moths and bees were seen, while beetles were more noticeable. Mosquitoes may be dismissed with the remark applied to the snakes of Ireland: there are none.

No exploring ship ever carried a more industrious scientific staff; its store of zoological and botanical plunder grew daily and the laboratory lights burned into the small hours for the identification of species and the preservation of specimens. The naval corps and the sailors also warmed up to the work, bringing in birds, mammals, fishes

and plants, some of them wielding the clumsy coal shovels from the fire-room, in digging ancient stone and bone implements from the shell heaps. Some of the shell heaps or "kitchen middens" as the archeologist called them, were several feet thick. Digging into them was laborious and the results called forth only contemptuous remarks from the sailors. A few arrow-heads, bone, flint and stone implements with bones of seals, and mussel and limpet shells did not seem to them worth the effort. But the ancient camp sites showed to those who could read their story, that the native population of the past had lived as simply as their descendants of the present, had subsisted on the same food, used the same primitive tools and camped on the same spots. There were doubtless more of them as barbarians decrease in numbers after contact with the white race.

Large mammals were, with the exception of fur seals and Antarctic sea lions, not common along the line of our operations, but foxes, otters, coypu, Ctenomys and other small fur bearers of the far south