Antarctica was in the news last week. In Antarctica itself, Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd was starting a 1,000-mile trek from the Bay of Whales. In Philadelphia was celebrated an antarctic centenary—the discovery of the Antarctica Continent by Charles Wilkes. To observe this anniversary, Philadelphia's well-heeled American Philosophical Society assembled a group of seamy explorers and scientific greybeards to review a century of U. S. polar exploration. They dined sumptuously (food from Holland's, Philadelphia's famed Negro caterers), but their talk was of privation and of hungry men: Wilkes, Kane, DeHaven, Hall, Greely,...
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