elds and behold the consternation among the
small folk beneath it,--ants, slugs, bugs, worms, spiders,--all
objecting to the full light of day, not because their deeds are evil,
but because the instinct of self-preservation prompts this course. As I
write these sentences, a chipmunk, who has his den in the bank by the
roadside near by, is very busy storing up some half-ripe currants which
grew on a bush a few yards away. Of course the currants will ferment and
rot, but that consideration does not disturb him; the seeds will keep,
and they are what he is after. In the early summer, before any of the
nuts and grains are ripened, the high cost of living among the lesser
rodents is very great, and they resort to all sorts of makeshifts.

V

In regard to this fullness of life in the hidden places of nature,
Darwin says as much of the world as a whole:

Well may we affirm that every part of the world is
inhabitable. Whether lakes of brine or those subterranean
ones hidden beneath volcanic mountains--warm mineral
springs--the wide expanse and depth of the ocean, the
upper regions of the atmosphere, and even the surface of
perpetual snow--all support organic beings.

Never before was there such a lover of natural history as Darwin. In the
earth, in the air, in the water, in the rocks, in the sand, in the
mud--he scanned the great biological record of the globe as it was never
scanned before. During the voyage of the Beagle he shirked no hardships
to add to his stores of natural knowledge. He would leave the
comfortable ship while it was making its surveys, and make journeys of
hundreds of miles on horseback through rough and dangerous regions to
glean new facts. Grass and water for his mules, and geology or botany or
zooelogy or anthropology for himself, and he was happy. At a great
altitude in the Andes the people had shortness of breath which they
called "puna," and they ate onions to correct it. Darwin says, with a
twinkle in his eye, "For my part I found nothing so good as the fossil
shells."

His Beagle voyage is a regular magazine of natural-history knowledge.
Was any country ever before so searched and sifted for its biological
facts? In lakes and rivers, in swamps, in woods, everywhere his
insatiable eye penetrated. One re-reads him always with a different
purpose in view. If you happen to be interested in insects, you read him
for that; if in birds, you read him for that; if in mammals, in fossils,