My Year of Darwin 6/2/2014: Leaving Galapagos

"The survey of the Galapagos Archipelago being concluded, we steered toward Tahiti and commenced our long passage of 3200 miles. 

That's it. Adieu South America. Darwin never sees the Amazon! Never visits the Tepuis of northern South America. Nothing of Central America, the Gulf of Mexico. So much missed but so much juice for the squeeze.

They do return to South America but only the east coast and not as extensively as the first round. Should Darwin have turned back now, what would he have come up with? How far would his thoughts on evolution gone. No hints of natural selection yet but he is strongly suggesting that organisms are capable of evolving and part of it is related to what they do (their ecology) and their isolation. 

Yay for normal fonts.  

My Year of Darwin 5/25/2014: Giddee-up tortoise

 

"I frequently got on their backs, and then giving a few raps on the hinder parts of their shells, they would rise up and walk away;- but I found it very difficult to keep my balance."

I do love thinking about the old Darwin, in his dotage, riding a tortoise but that's that the way it happened. It was a mid-20 year old Darwin that climbed mountains, survived sub-freezing nights under the stars, and cutthroats on the road.

Here are some great pics I found of Darwin and others riding tortoises. They're all, of course, t-shirts you can buy 

My Year of Darwin 5/18/2014: Salt and skulls in the Galapagos

  

"One day we accompanied a party of the Spaniards in their whale-boat to a salina, or lake from which salt is procured. After landing we had a very rough walk over a rugged field of recent lava, which has almost surrounded a tuff-crater at the bottom of which the salt-lake lies. The water is only three or four inches deep and rests on a layer of beautifully crystallised, which salt. The lake is quite circular, and is fringed with a border of bright green succulent plants; the almost precipitous walls of the cater are clothed with wood, so that the scene was both picturesque and curious. A few years since the sailors belonging to a sealing-vessel murdered their captain in the quiet spot; and we saw his skull lying among the bushes ." Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle 

My Year of Darwin 5/16/2014: Lovely lazy lava lizards

  

"The day was overpoweringly hot, and the lake looked clear and blue: I hurried down the cindery slope, and, choked with dust, eagerly tasted the water-but, to my sorry, I found it salt as brine. 

The rocks on the coast abounded with great black lizards, between three and four feet long; and on the hills, an ugly yellowish-brown species was equally common. We see many of this latter kind, some clumsily running out of the way, and others shuffling into their burrows." Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle 

The first is the marine iguana, which I think nearly everyone familiar with the story of Darwin and the Galapagos knows. I had no idea what the second is so I looked it up. Darwin's description is too vague to determine the particular species but he's probably referring to one of the over-twenty species of lava lizards that occur on the Galapagos Islands.  Now I know!