A CHILD OF NATURE. 



135 



brown juice running from the comers of his mouth. In 

 other words, he preferred to chew. Whether this old man 

 was a philosopher, we do not know, for our conversations 

 were mostly carried on by means of a Spanish-speaking 

 sailor ; but at any rate he was a veritable child 

 of Nature. 



The present of an axe, which could do more work in ten 

 minutes than his poor " machete " could perform in several 

 hours, caused him the most extreme joy : and he felt its 

 edge as lovingly, and handled it as carefully, as a hunter 

 would the rifle which stood between him and starvation. 

 Matches he prized and cherished, as if they had been worth 

 their weight in gold, as doubtless they very nearly were 

 to him ; for had his fire gone out, he must needs walk two 

 miles to borrow some ; and failing this source the nearest 

 were on the mainland, ninety miles across the sea. To see 

 the infinite care with which he struck one made us realize 

 somehow, more than anything else, how lonely and 

 isolated this man was. 



Close to the old hermit's enclosure, and lying perched 

 on a rather steep slope, was a large, almost perfectly 

 spherical mass of granite. It was so round and so oddly 

 isolated, that when we first saw it from a distance, we 

 thought it might possibly be of meteoritic origin. A 

 closer inspection shewed that it owed its shape to the 

 influence of simple weathering, softness of the particular 

 kind of granite of which the island is maialy composed 

 (Biotite *), and its position on the slope. The photograph 

 of it, and of other bizarre shapes assumed by some of the 

 rocks at the southern end of the island, will give the reader 

 some idea of the part played by wind and rain, especially 

 the former, in the sculpturing and wearing down of the 

 surface of this island: for undoubtedly, when first it 

 emerged from the depths of the sea, Blanquilla was far 

 from presenting the smooth, planed down surface which 

 almost everywhere it does to-day. 



* Fron* specimens kindly identified for me by Dr. Pryor, of the South 

 Kensington Museum. 



