Thomas R. Henry

“ Then with each family, it was a case of survival of the fittest and variation of form and structure to fit the environment.
Here is the stark struggle for survival with the mask of sunlight, green fields and flowers discarded. It is not different in kind but in degree from the struggle that goes on continually between living things at the surface of the ocean and on the land. Down there all must eat flesh. There is no plant life intermediary between beast and beast. Plants cannot grow below the light line of the sea depths. ”

“ The weavers are as flourishing, and busy, as ever.
Like a coral polyp or the larva of a clam, the bryozoan starts life as an almost invisibly minute, free-swimming creature, usually less than a thirtieth of an inch long. After a few weeks it settles on some hard surface, usually a stone, and secretes its limestone shell. New individuals rise from the body of the founder of the colony at various angles, depending on the particular design of the tapestry being produced. ”

“ One of the weirdest of living mammals is the potto—“ghost monkey”, of West African jungles. It is about the size of a squirrel, with soft, yellow fur and protruding yellow eyes which shine like malevolent witch lights in the darkness of the jungle nights. The potto is a nocturnal animal of the tree tops. Its weird, whimpering cries are believed by natives to be the voices of evil spirits. The little creature is an aberrant member of the family of lemurs, ancient offshoots of the same family from which sprang the monkeys and great apes. ”

“ All the cards were stacked against the survival of the opossum, but it developed a means of its own to keep a tenacious hold on life while far more efficient creatures—beset with new enemies and changing climates—were forced to give up. The great mammoth herds, lords of the earth for a million years, disappeared. The ferocious saber-tooth tiger and the great cave bear expired by the roadside in the race of evolution. But the poor opossum had discovered the important principle that the meek shall inherit the earth—or, at least, be allowed to live in it. ”

“ A densely woven carpet of life covers the floor of the world of light under the sea—just below the level reached by the most penetrating rays of the sun. It is a carpet of many colors and of flashing lights, the strands of its texture rapidly moving, predaceous, warring organisms. They probably are a mixture of lantern-carrying fish, ten-tentacled squid with malevolent red eyes, and small, luminous, shrimp-like creatures known as euphasids. Their nature can only be deduced by the echoes of sound from their bodies. ”

“ It is a sea on stilts, the world’s fourth realm of life. There are plants and animals of the land, of the water, and of the air—and there are plants and animals of the canopy of the rain forest, a thousand-mile-wide broken belt around the world. ”

“ There, through many centuries, the prayers of millions belonging to warring creeds have worn thin the curtain between the effable and the ineffable. It is a shrine of four of the world’s great religions. In the rock is a depression that looks like a giant’s footprint. Hindus believe it was made by snake-haired Siva, the destroyer. Moslems say it is the footprint of the first man, Adam, who was exiled to this mountaintop after he was thrown out of Paradise. ”

“ The Smithsonian specimens, as well as those in other museums and collections throughout the world, are types. Once they were individuals with passions, fears, hungers, perhaps some dim wonderings and questionings. The type is the eternal reality. The individual is the brief-lived example of this reality, the flame of a candle fluttering in a windy moment. ”

“ Over all the land spreads the grey shadow of the supernatural. Below him is one of the most imposing spectacles on earth—the middle slopes scarlet with the blossoms of dense forests of gigantic rhododendrons, the deep-blue patches of mountain lakes, and canyons which no human has entered—their mysterious depths hidden by wind-tossed fog. ”

“ As its hours pass we can expect a constant succession of new paradoxes, new spurs to further advances.
Man would be in a sad situation were it otherwise. For the bright light of noon and afternoon inevitably precedes sunset and darkness and sleep. ”

“ There are millions of pale stars grouped in all sorts of astrological configurations. Some are isolated in space. Some are packed in dense galaxies. There are black voids between them, like the curtain of star dust that hides the center of the universe. They are only a few feet overhead. One can reach up and pluck these stars, one by one, out of the sky. [Pg 4] Unlike the heavenly bodies, they do not twinkle. They shine steadily in complete motionlessness. Pale and weird, they illumine a realm of eternal night. ”

“ Both of these species, in the long process of adapting themselves to high jungle life, have made third hands out of the ends of their tails. With these highly sensitive prehensile organs they not only clutch branches but sometimes carry out rather delicate manipulations.
Weirdest are the black-and-white striped, woolly-furred night monkeys. These little racoon-like creatures live in holes far up in the treetops. They come out only at night and are seldom seen. They have enormous eyes which shine like live coals among the leaves when the light of a flash lamp catches them. ”

“ Two of the most beautiful of these shell forms were recently discovered by Dr. Paul Bartsch, former Smithsonian curator of mollusks. Fragile, translucent, colored as delicately as the loveliest of orchids, these particular snails are the fairies of the mollusk world in the unconscious artistry with which they have constructed their moving palaces. One, a hitherto unknown species, has a remarkable combination of pale orange, orange buff, deeper orange and flame color—all shading delicately into each other. The color effect is such as one might find rarely in rose petals. ”

“ It waits there for the follower to open the hive and usually until the person has departed with his loot of honeycomb, when it comes down to the plundered bee’s nest and begins to feed on the bits of comb left strewn about. The time during which the bird may wait quietly may vary from a few minutes to well over an hour and a half.”
African natives regard the bird as an almost infallible guide to honey. They try to attract it by grunting like a ratel or chopping on trees to imitate the sound of opening a nest. ”

“ Among nature’s weirdest tricks is the strange phenomenon known as merokinosis, reported for a single family of almost microscopic insects. The little creatures are fathers and mothers before they are born. They are a species of mite which infests grass. They belong to a family which, almost alone among insects, gives birth to living young.
Nearly all insects are egg layers. The eggs, usually deposited in enormous numbers, hatch outside the body of the mother. Then the individuals go through a series of metamorphoses—nymph, larva and the like—before reaching their own reproductive maturity. ”

“ Acting apparently on a common, sub-conscious, simultaneous impulse, the entire lemming population starts a mass migration out of the mountains to the lowlands. The animals proceed in a straight line, a few feet apart, each usually tracing a shallow furrow in the soil. They are a devouring scourge, stripping the earth of all [Pg 196] vegetation in their path. Their progress seems irresistible. No obstacle stops them. If they come across a man they glide between his legs. If they meet with a haystack they gnaw through it. ”

“ Around the male gorilla, on account of its enormous size and strength, coupled in recent years with frequent lapses from grace provoked by unnecessary and undue interference, there has been woven and unfortunately published a fantasy of inaccuracy and exaggeration—so much so that the very homely old male is visualized as an object of dread. The male gorilla, as the family head, is most solicitous for the welfare of his wives and children—a very human trait. ”

“ Every bryozoan in a colony remains throughout its life a separate animal, shut off from its fellows by a wall of limestone and leading an independent existence. Nevertheless, in the species pattern it assumes, each colony acts as if it were a single organism.
Moreover, a phenomenon unique in nature, every individual appears to be two and in some species three animals in one. Each leads its own life and dies its own death at its own time. ”

“ A coral reef is a gigantic “plant-animal.” It is a community of countless billions of plants and countless billions of animals which act as a single organism, like the countless millions of specialized cells that make up the body of a man or a mouse. It is probably the most efficient of all earthly creatures. It is self-sufficient, creating its own constant food supply. It is essentially immortal. It is hungry like an animal. It is motionless like a plant. ”

“ Giants of this nether world—largely invisible, although the average size is more than a thousand times that of the bacteria—are thread-like white worms from a hundredth to a fifth of an inch long. Relatively they are not very plentiful—less than six million to a cubic foot of soil in most places. In both size and numbers in the earth population, they are like elephants compared to mice. Still they probably are numerically the most abundant of all animals which consist of more than a single cell. In the entire animal kingdom only the protozoa outnumber them. ”

“ Admittedly the conception of a reef as a sort of superorganism is somewhat mystical. The Duke and University of Georgia biologists do not maintain that there is any consciousness of constituting a whole on the part of the individual organisms. It is likely that they have no consciousness of anything. The outstanding fact is that they behave so much like a whole.
A reef is an outstanding example of the two major divisions of life, plant and animal, working in perfect co-operation. The actual co-operation of plant and animal in an integrated organism is not unique for the coral reefs. ”

“ Standing from three to four feet high and looking and acting deceptively like a human being, the emperor penguin undoubtedly is one of the most remarkable birds in existence. It presumably is confined to the Ross Sea side of the Antarctic continent. The bird—actually it is about two-thirds feathers—remains an evolutionary enigma. Theories have been advanced that it is the last surviving member of the fauna of the Antarctic continent about fifty million years ago when the shorelines were free of ice. It certainly is off any known road of evolution. ”

“ We would find this fairy kingdom peopled with the strangest creatures—creatures that swim with their hair, have ruby eyes blazing deep in their necks, with telescopic limbs that now are withdrawn wholly into their bodies and now stretched out to many times their own length. ”

“ Production of a common and distinctive odor which enables the colony to defend itself against members of other communities is a very important consequence of the habit of food-sharing. Better sharing means better defense and so a greater likelihood that the community will be able to survive and perpetuate its kind. The habit plays the key role in the system of communication which enables the new forager to learn about suitable crops, in that the new recruit always receives a sample of the crop the colony is working. The first flight becomes a search for a crop with a similar scent. ”

“ Each animal consists of apparently quite separate parts, body and tail. The body is from six inches to a foot long, according to species, and the tail may be twice as long. The animal can disengage its tail by a single twist when caught by that organ. The slightest injury or rough handling causes this tail to fly to pieces. Each piece wriggles energetically, supposedly to attract attention while the lizard itself crawls to safety in its burrow. The body does not break up and does not, as popularly reputed, come back later to gather up fragments of its tail. ”

“ Fortunately the number of these paradoxes is infinite, and so the quests are endless. Man never will know a wonderless world. In the phenomena of life especially we have come only to the zone of morning twilight. ”

“ The unfortunate shelled animal is like a fish caught on a hook. It struggles vainly to get away. It rushes, but the fungus simply lets out [Pg 47] the line until the rhizopod is brought to an abrupt stop and can be hauled in. The line is a filament connecting the body of the fungus with the bulb in the animal’s mouth.
Once its prey is secure, the fungus proceeds to send out growths from the bulb through the creature’s flesh, literally eating it alive. Very rarely, like a hooked fish, a rhizopod is able to break away. ”

“ They were not, and never became, wood cells, bark cells, pith cells, leaf cells or any of the other numerous, specialized kinds of cells which make up the plant world. They were something very close to the primaeval plant cells from which, in the course of a couple of billion years, all the others have been derived. Very early these unit structures of life learned that they must stick together and do specialized jobs for each other under the actual conditions of nature. Out of these combinations of specialists has arisen all the magnificent structure of the living world. ”

“ The World of Insects
The Roman naturalist Pliny wrote of ants in the Himalayas “the color of a cat and as large as an Egyptian wolf.” Pliny naively had accepted tales of travellers but the actual curiosities of the insect world are almost as strange as anything he related. There are bugs that live in ice, bugs that are happy only in near boiling water, snow white bugs that dwell deep in the earth, bugs that make their homes in petroleum pools.
None are as big as wolves, but the insect world has its giants as well as its dwarfs. The Atlas moth of India has a wing-spread of nearly a foot. ”

“ Today the three-eyed lizard is probably the world’s most rigidly protected animal. The New Zealand government has placed all sorts of legal restrictions on hunting or capturing it, and to kill one would be a major crime. For that matter, very few persons living ever have seen a tuatera. It stays in seclusion most of the time. There is a single specimen in the zoological park at Wellington. When a party from a Byrd Antarctic expedition visited there they were told that the lizard had not been seen for several months and that it was highly improbable that it could be lured out of hiding. ”