Scientific American Supplement No. 822, October 3, 1891Various
Science
Scientific American Supplement No. 822, October 3, 1891
Various
Science -- Periodicals
The country about this interior basin is heavily wooded, and spars of
75 feet can be obtained in generous numbers. Were it not for the
native inhabitants, mosquitoes, and flies, the interior would present
conditions charming enough to tempt any lover of nature. It is the
abundance of these invincible foes which make interior life a burden
and almost an impossibility. To these inhabitants alone Grand Falls
has ceased to chant its melodious tune. Hereafter its melodious ripple
will be heard by Bowdoin College, which, in the name of its explorers,
Cary and Cole, claims the honor of its discovery.--_New York Times_.
* * * * *
ANTS.
By RUTH WARD KAHN.
Astronomy has made us all familiar with the conception of the world
over our heads. We no longer speculate with Epicurus and Anaxagoras
whether the sun may be as large as a quoit, or even as large as
Peloponnesus. We are satisfied that the greater and the lesser lights
are worlds, some of them greatly exceeding our own in magnitude.
In a little poem of Dante Rossetti's, he describes a mood of violent
grief in which, sitting with his head bowed between his knees, he
unconsciously eyes the wood spurge growing at his feet, till from
those terrible moments he carries away the one trivial fact cut into
his brain for all time, that "the wood spurge has a cup of three." In
some such mood of troubled thought, flung perhaps full length on the
turf, have we not as unconsciously and intently watched a little ant,
trudging across our prostrate form, intent upon its glorious polity: a
creature to which we, with our great spiritual world of thought and
emotion and will, have no existence except as a sudden and
inconvenient upheaval of parti-colored earth to be scaled, of unknown
geological formation, but wholly worthless as having no bearing upon
the one great end of their life--the care of larvae.
If we hold with Mr. Wallace that the chief difference between man and
the lower animals is that of kind and not of degree--that man is
possessed of an intelligent will that appoints its own ends, of a
conscience that imposes upon him a "categorical imperative," of
spiritual faculties that apprehend and worship the invisible--yet we
must admit that his lower animal nature, which forms, as it, were, the
platform of the spiritual, is built up of lower organisms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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