More than a year has passed since the incidents occurred which are the subject of this article. During that time much of the detail has faded from my memory, the impressions have become blurred, and the ideas which then formed themselves in my mind are now forgotten. Yet it may be that a few notes on that time spent on the Greenland ice-cap will be of some use to travellers who, in the future, may be faced with a similar problem. If, by these notes, I can do something to dispel the strange ideas of danger and risk in leaving a man in such a situation, I shall feel justified. There are many men, trappers and the like, who live by themselves for most of the year. An accident is very rare among these men, nor are their minds usually deranged.

Kellerman, A (ed.). 1989. Identification Key and Catalogue of Larval Antarctic Fishes. (BIOMASS Scientific Series 10). Cambridge, AWI, SCAR and CCAMLR, 136 pp. ISBN 0 948277 03 3

The published ISBN for this volume is incorrect. The correct ISBN is as follows:

ISBN 0 948277 12 2

It was noted in Table 3 of the first paper that the failure rate of common types of valves is about one half per cent per thousand hours of operation. Some other components are as unreliable as this, but they are not employed in such large numbers in typical electronic equipment so that (at least until very recently) valves are much the commonest cause of electronic equipment failure. The mechanical and electrical tests which valves are required to pass before the Armed Services grant type approval are given in Joint Service Specification K1001, Ministry of Aviation, June 1958. In an analysis of failure reports made in 1953 in the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, civil aviation, and under typical laboratory conditions, the proportion of faults traced to valves ranged from 45 to 55 per cent of the total. Under conditions of rough handling the average life of valves is likely to be further reduced, more so than for any other common component, so that the number of faults and the proportion of faults due to valves, will be even higher.

It has long been supposed that repeated exposure of a man to cold conditions might be expected to produce changes within him which would better enable him to stand up to those cold conditionsto acclimatize to cold. Until recently, however, there has been little and conflicting evidence of the mechanism of such changes. Accounts of the polar explorers of the Scott-Amundsen era reveal that these men were exposed to severe cold stresses, but unfortunately the sophisticated research facilities necessary to measure the various factors involved were not then available. Now that these facilities are available, man conducts his polar activities under far more comfortable conditions, and the degree of cold stress to which he is exposed is probably of a much smaller order. Small wonder, then, that research into the elusive phenomenon of acclimatization to cold has yielded little profit. In fact, the available evidence suggests that the polar traveller may well undergo a marked heat stress as a result of strenuous exercise under conditions in which he is unable to get rid of surplus heat easily. This article looks at the basic physiological problems of heat loss and heat conservation with which the modern polar traveller has to contend, and points out the results of some recent investigations.

There was no animal on South Georgia that we took into our hearts so much as these comical ‘Johnnies’, as the whalers call them. Not one of us, I am convinced, will recall our isolated existence in later years without simultaneously thinking with inner pleasure of these wonderful creatures. In their droll caricaturing of human gait and movements they provided an inexhautible source of humorous observations; further, in that their eggs allowed our chef to rise to unexpected achievements, they provided an equally pleasant resource.