264 EDGE OF THE JUNGLE 



chiefly with ornithology, teetotalism, arrowheads, 

 politics^ botany, or finance, in this bay one's 

 thoughts would be sure to be concentrated on 

 butterflies. And no less interesting than the but- 

 terflies were their immediate surroundings. The 

 day before, I had sat close by on a low boulder 

 at the head of the tiny bay, with not a butterfly in 

 sight. It occurred to me that my ancestor, 

 Eryops, would have been perfectly at home, for 

 in front of me were clumps of strange, carbonif- 

 erous rushes, lacking leaves and grace, and 

 sedges such as might be fashioned in an attempt 

 to make plants out of green straw. Here and 

 there an ancient jointed stem was in blossom, a 

 pinnacle of white filaments, and hour after hour 

 there came little brown trigonid visitors, sting- 

 less bees, whose nests were veritable museums 

 of flower extracts — tubs of honey, hampers of 

 pollen, barrels of ambrosia, hoarded in castles 

 of wax. Scirpus-sedge or orchid, all was the 

 same to them. 



All odor evaded me until I had recourse to 

 my usual olfactory crutch, placing the flower in 

 a vial in the sunlight. Delicate indeed was the 

 fragrance which did not yield itself to a few min- 

 utes of this distillation. As I removed the cork 



