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 7 
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 
