Nature seems not [to] have designed that man should be much abroad by night, and in the moon proportioned the light fitly. By the faintness and rareness of the light compared with that of the sun, she expresses her intention with regard to him. _June 15. Sunday._ Darwin still:— Finds runaway sailors on the Chonos Archipelago, who he thought “had kept a very good reckoning of time,” having lost only four days in fifteen months. Near same place, on the islands of the archipelago, he found wild potato, the tallest four feet high, tubers generally small but one two inches in diameter; “resembled in every respect, and had the same smell as English potatoes; but when boiled they shrunk much, and were watery and insipid, without any bitter taste.” Speaking of the surf on the coast of Chiloe, “I was assured that, after a heavy gale, the roar can be heard at night even at Castro, a distance of no less than twenty-one sea-miles, across a hilly and wooded country.” Subsidence and elevation of the west coast of South America and of the Cordilleras. “Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.” Would like to see Sir Francis Head’s travels in South America,—Pampas perhaps.[210] Also Chambers’ “Sea Levels.” Also travels of Spix and Von Martius. It is said that hydrophobia was first known in South America in 1803. At the Galapagos, the tortoises going to any place travel night and day and so get there sooner than would be expected,—about eight miles in two or three days. He rode on their backs. The productions of the Galapagos Archipelago, from five to six hundred miles from America, are still of the American type. “It was most striking to be surrounded by new birds, new reptiles, new shells, new insects, new plants, and yet, by innumerable trifling details of structure, and even by the tones of voice and plumage of the birds, to have the temperate plains of Patagonia, or the hot, dry deserts of Northern Chile, vividly brought before my eyes.” What is most singular, not only are the plants, etc., to a great extent peculiar to these islands, but each for the most part has its own kinds, though they are within sight of each other. Birds so tame that they can be killed with a stick. _I_ would suggest that, from having dealt so long with the inoffensive and slow-moulded tortoise, they have not yet acquired an instinctive fear of man, who is a new-comer. Methinks tortoises, lizards, etc., for wild creatures are remarkable for the nearness to which man approaches them and handles them, as logs,—cold-blooded, lumpish forms of life,—only taking care not to step into their mouths. An alligator has been known to have come out of the mud like a mud volcano where was now the floor of a native’s hut.