Part 1

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

Italics are represented thus italic.

THE STRANGEST THINGS IN THE WORLD

THE STRANGEST THINGS IN THE WORLD

A Book About Extraordinary Manifestations of Nature

THOMAS R. HENRY

Public Affairs Press, Washington, D. C.

Copyright, 1958, by Public Affairs Press 419 New Jersey Avenue, S. E., Washington 3, D. C.

Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 58-10881

INTRODUCTION

The challenges of Nature’s paradoxes have been sharp spurs to man’s search for knowledge since the start of science.

Fortunately the number of these paradoxes is infinite, and so the quests are endless. Man never will know a wonderless world. In the phenomena of life especially we have come only to the zone of morning twilight. The bright day of understanding is ahead. As its hours pass we can expect a constant succession of new paradoxes, new spurs to further advances.

Man would be in a sad situation were it otherwise. For the bright light of noon and afternoon inevitably precedes sunset and darkness and sleep.

This book is a compendium of some of Nature’s curiosities and contradictions in the field of life and as such it well may awaken that wonder which, as somebody has said, is the beginning of knowledge.

The author is one of the world’s best-known and most respected science writers. This book is a personal and unique distillation of the wisdom he has developed in a lifetime of dealing with man’s effort to resolve the paradoxes of nature.

LEONARD CARMICHAEL

Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

PREFACE

Life has invaded nearly every crack and crevasse of the world during the billion years since it left its first traces on this planet. It has adjusted itself to all extremes of living, from nearly airless mountaintops five miles high to lightless floors of oceans five miles deep. It has found abodes in boiling hot springs and in the everlasting ice of Antarctic peaks. It very likely has invaded the cold, red deserts of Mars. Everywhere it has succeeded in altering the garments it wears to meet the stresses it has experienced.

It has achieved semi-infinite variety. There are approximately a quarter million species of plants now known in the world. Most abundant and varied life is that of the insects who may be on their way to displace man and his fellow mammals as lords of the earth. A rough estimate of the number of species identified up to now is 800,000. Several thousand hitherto unknown are described each year. Of mammals, including man, there may be as many as 14,000 distinct species and geographic races extant. About 8,500 species of birds are catalogued. Sub-species and geographic races increase this number to about 30,000. Known fishes number 40,000 species and sub-species.

Still, naturalists say, there are great mansions of life almost unknown to man. The collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington grow at the rate of about a million specimens a year, always including forms hitherto uncatalogued. Much of the material in the following pages is based on Smithsonian information, although other sources and personal observations have been liberally drawn upon.

The Smithsonian specimens, as well as those in other museums and collections throughout the world, are types. Once they were individuals with passions, fears, hungers, perhaps some dim wonderings and questionings. The type is the eternal reality. The individual is the brief-lived example of this reality, the flame of a candle fluttering in a windy moment.

I have brought together in these pages notes about the most extraordinary manifestations of nature that have come to my attention in the course of thirty years as a science reporter. Each example is, of course, based upon a distinctly individual expression of nature, but all are very much interrelated in this truly amazing world of ours.

THOMAS R. HENRY

Washington, D. C.

The Invisible Underground Jungle

There may be as many as twenty-five million invisible plants and animals in a gram of soil about the size of a grain of sand. It would take a thousand such grains to make a marble.