Staple Dietary Ingredients Secured | My Web Site Page 166 Chapter 03 Page 03

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By 8.30 in the morning of December 5th we entered the mouth of the Madeira River. I was surprised at the sudden change in the appearance of the two rivers. We saw in the Madeira high, gently sloping banks, covered with verdant grass and neat trees and palms along the top of them; whereas along the Amazon the trees stood almost in the water on the recently formed islands and banks. The left bank of the Madeira was of grey and reddish clay (grey below, red above), cut vertically, sometimes actually in steps. Blocks of a rectangular shape, in getting dried up, split and fell over, leaving the banks vertical. The right bank, on the contrary, was gently sloping, descending with a beautiful carpet of green grass into the stream. The islands were charming, with lovely lawns all round. Blackish and deep red rock, vertical and fluted, and with innumerable perforations, could be seen here and there, covered over with a padding of earth from ten to twenty feet deep.

Lamarck[21] (1744-1829) seems to have thought out his theory of evolution without any knowledge of Erasmus Darwin's which it closely resembled. The central idea of his theory was the cumulative inheritance of functional modifications. "Changes in environment bring about changes in the habits of animals. Changes in their wants necessarily bring about parallel changes in their habits. If new wants become constant or very lasting, they form new habits, the new habits involve the use of new parts, or a different use of old parts, which results finally in the production of new organs and the modification of old ones." He differed from Buffon in not attaching importance, as far as animals are concerned, to the direct influence of the environment, "for environment can effect no direct change whatever upon the organisation of animals," but in regard to plants he agreed with Buffon that external conditions directly moulded them.

That there is a close likeness between all these bodies is obvious from the fact that when any of them is strongly heated, or allowed to putrefy, it gives off the same sort of disagreeable smell; and careful chemical analysis has shown that they are, in fact, all composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, combined in very nearly the same proportions. Indeed, charcoal, which is impure carbon, might be obtained by strongly heating either a handful of corn, or a piece of fowl's flesh, in a vessel from which the air is excluded so as to keep the corn or the flesh from burning. And if the vessel were a still, so that the products of this destructive distillation, as it is called, could be condensed and collected, we should find water and ammonia, in some shape or other, in the receiver. Now ammonia is a compound of the elementary bodies, nitrogen and hydrogen; therefore both nitrogen and hydrogen must have been contained in the bodies from which it is derived.

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