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Taglagallo Remarcafkus Directory 02
Page 07
Almost never do we find a device in nature which occurs once only. The unique hardly exists: nature is a great copyist. At least two animals of wholly unlike kinds are all but sure to hit independently upon the self-same mechanism. So it is not surprising to learn that a cat-fish has invented an exactly similar mode of carrying its young to that adopted by the Surinam toad: only, here it is on the under surface, not the upper one, that the spawn is plastered. The eggs of this cat-fish, whose scientific name is Aspredo, are pressed into the skin below the body, and so borne about by the mother till they hatch. This is the second instance of which I spoke above, where the female fish herself assumes the care of her offspring, instead of leaving it entirely to her excellent partner.
We went along the banks of the beautiful island of Antas, after which we halted at the house of Jose Maracati, a Mundurucu chieftain, with thirty Indians under him. A delegate of the Para Province in charge of the Indians--a man of strong Malay characteristics and evidently of Indian parentage--received us, and gave me much information about the local rubber industry. He told me that the best rubber found in that region was the kind locally called _seringa preta_, a black rubber which was coagulated with the smoke of the _coco de palmeira_. He calculated that 150 rubber trees gave about 14 kilos of rubber a day. The _seringa preta_ exuded latex all the year round, even during the rainy season.
Yet we are very grateful to those who can teach us to turn our eyes to the charm which surrounds us, and a life which is lived without such perception is apt to be a rough and hurrying thing, even though it may also be both high and austere. Like most of life, the true success lies in not choosing one force and neglecting another, but in an expectant kind of compromise. The great affairs and facts of life flash upon us, whether we will or no; and even the man whose mind is bent upon the greatest hopes and aims may find strength and consolation in the lesser and simpler delights. Mighty spirits like, let us say, Carlyle and Ruskin, were not hampered or distracted from their further quest by the microscopic eye, the infinite zest for detail, which characterised both. No one ever spoke so finely as Carlyle of the salient features of moorland and hill, and the silence so deep that it was possible to hear the faroff sheep cropping the grass; no one ever noted so instantaneously the vivid gesture or the picturesque turn of speech, or dwelt more intently upon the pathetic sculpture of experience seen in the old humble workaday faces of country-folk. No one ever delighted more ecstatically than Ruskin in the colour of the amber cataract, with its soft, translucent rims, its flying spray, or in the dim splendours of some half-faded fresco, or in the intricate facade of the crumbling, crag-like church front. But they did not stay there; indeed, Carlyle, in his passionate career among verities and forces, hardly took enough account of the beauty so patiently entwined with mortal things; while Ruskin's sharpest agonies were endured when he found, to his dismay, that men and women could not be induced by any appeal or invective to heed the message of beauty.
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