194 AT MINNIKOY 



Malabar — by the small brigs of the islanders, and there 

 they are exchanged for grain and cloth, and such frugal 

 luxuries as these simple people use. 



To the curious traveller, who loves to delude him- 

 self by trying to extricate causes from their complicated 

 effects, and to reduce human movements to their lowest 

 terms, Minnikoy is thus an ideal spot. For here he 

 seems to see a few large and simple forces of nature 

 breaking up, before his very eyes, into the multifarious 

 pulsations of the human heart. A few lowly organisms 

 change some of the soluble constituents of seawater into 

 stone : the waves break down the stone and cast it up 

 again into a little pile of dry land : the ocean currents, as 

 they sweep by, leave some coconuts stranded upon the 

 new-formed shore, and these coconuts, germinating, 

 give rise after a few generations to a fund of potential 

 energy, which a chance boat-load of colonists, tossed 

 up probably by the same ocean currents, at length 

 converts into the ordered movements of a fairly complex 

 social machine. 



But unrelenting care, who boards ships and who 

 rides behind the trooper's horse, also finds her way 

 to coral islands and climbs up the coconut palms, 

 where, taking the form of a plague of rats, who gnaw 

 the young nuts so that they die and fall before their 

 time, she strikes at the very root of the islanders' 

 prosperity. Many remedies have been proposed for this 

 rat pest ; it is said that cats, owls, ichneumons, and 



