UNDER THE MAPLES 



the Beagle he shirked no hardships to add to his 

 stores of natural knowledge. He would leave the 

 comfortable ship while it was making its surveys, 

 and make journeys of hundreds of miles on horse- 

 back through rough and dangerous regions to glean 

 new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geol- 

 ogy or botany or zoology or anthropology for him- 

 self, and he was happy. At a great altitude in the 

 Andes the people had shortness of breath which 

 they called "puna," and they ate onions to correct 

 it. Darwin says, with a twinkle in his eye, "For my 

 part I found nothing so good as the fossil shells." 

 His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of 

 natural-history knowledge. Was any country 

 ever before so searched and sifted for its biological 

 facts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods, 

 everywhere his insatiable eye penetrated. One 

 re-reads him always with a different purpose in 

 view. If you happen to be interested in insects, 

 you read him for that; if in birds, you read him 

 for that; if in mammals, in fossils, in reptiles, in 

 volcanoes, in anthropology, you read him with 

 each of these subjects in mind. I recently had in 

 mind the problem of the soaring condor, and I 

 re-read him for that, and, sure enough, he had 

 studied and mastered that subject, too. If you 

 are interested in seeing how the biological char- 

 acteristics of the two continents, North and South 

 America, agree or contrast with each other, you 



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