t without the accompaniment of vegetables; these being supplied
by the tussac-grass, the stalks of which contain a white edible
substance, in taste somewhat resembling a hazel-nut, while the young
shoots boiled are almost equal to asparagus. [Note 1.]

While seated at their midday meal, they have before their eyes a moving
world of nature, such as may be found only in her wildest solitudes.
All around the kelp-bed, porpoises are ploughing the water, now and then
bounding up out of it; while seals and sea-otters show their human-like
heads, swimming among the weeds. Birds hover above in such numbers as
to darken the air, some at intervals darting down and going under with a
plunge that sends the spray aloft in showers white as a snow-drift.
Others do their fishing seated on the water; for there are many
different kinds of water-fowl here represented--gulls, shags,
cormorants, gannets, noddies, and petrels, with several species of
_Anativae_, among them the beautiful black-necked swan. Nor are they
all seabirds, or exclusively inhabitants of the water. Among those
wheeling in the air above is an eagle and a small black vulture, with
several sorts of hawks--the last, the Chilian _jota_ [Note 2]. Even the
gigantic condor often extends its flight to the Land of Fire, whose
mountains are but a continuation of the great Andean chain.

The ways and movements of this teeming ornithological world are so
strange and varied that our castaways, despite all anxiety about their
own future, cannot help being interested in observing them. They see a
bird of one kind diving and bringing to the surface a fish, which
another, of a different species, snatches from it and bears aloft, in
its turn to be attacked by a third equally rapacious winged hunter,
that, swooping at the robber, makes him forsake his ill-gotten prey,
while the prey itself, reluctantly dropped, is dexterously re-caught in
its whirling descent long ere it reaches its own element--the whole
incident forming a very chain of tyranny and destruction! And yet a
chain of but few links compared with that to be found in and under the
water, among the leaves and stalks of the kelp itself. There the
destroyers and the destroyed are legion, not only in numbers, but in
kind. A vast world in itself, so densely populated and of so many
varied organisms that, for a due delineation of it, I must again borrow
from the inimitable pen of Darwin. Thus he describes it:--

"The num