196 SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS [Lif 



The Tenacity of Life. 



The vitality of the large-bodied moths is quite astonishing. 

 You may even stamp upon them and yet not crush the life out 

 of that frail casket. If you drive the life out of one half of the 

 creature, it only seems to take refuge in the other, and then 

 retains a more powerful hold. So unless the entire mechanism 

 of the insect be killed, the poor creature may live for days in 

 pain. c. o. 



Life where Least Expected. 



The great Karoo at the base of the Roggeveld and Nieuveld 

 chain is 300 miles in length, 80 miles in breadth, and 2000 feet 

 above the sea-level. Its soil presents throughout its whole 

 extent, for the greater portion of the year, not a trace of 

 vegetation. During the long dry summer months the smallest 

 birds would not find wherewithal to sustain their existence 

 in these sombre deserts, whose solemn silence not even the 

 murmur of an insect interrupts. Yet these regions, deprived 

 of springs and running waters, are not always sterile deserts, 

 are not always desolate plains. In the dry season, the soil, 

 a yellow ferruginous clay, acquires the hardness of brick, just as 

 if it had been exposed to the fire of a furnace ; but the roots 

 and bulbs, protected by a ligneous covering, resist the devouring 

 heat. The first rains revive them ; they put forth their stems 

 and branches ; a myriad flowers reveal their sparkling colours ; 

 and the country which, a day or two before, had shown to the 

 eye a bare and dreary surface, shines out in a panoply of 

 splendour, as if a magician's spell had suddenly transformed it 

 into a terrestrial paradise. But as the days lengthen, and the 

 sun's power increases, the bloom and the beauty vanish, and the 

 curse of fire once more descends upon the gloomy scene. D. 



Life in Apparent Death. 



The grains of wheat found in Egyptian tombs, on being 

 planted in the soil of France, grew into waving corn. For three 

 thousand years these grains had been without life, yet we can- 



