d then vanish.

We who strive for a little insight into evolution and the meaning of
things as they are, forever long for a glimpse of things as they were.
Here at my laboratory I wonder what the land was like before the dense
mat of vegetation came to cover every rock and grain of sand, or how
the rivers looked when first their waters trickled to the sea.

All our stories are of the middles of things,--without beginning or
end; we scientists are plunged suddenly upon a cosmos in the full
uproar of eons of precedent, unable to look ahead, while to look
backward we must look down.

Exactly a year ago I spent two hours in a clearing in the jungle back
of Kartabo laboratory, and let my eyes and ears have full swing.[2]
Now in August of the succeeding year I came again to this clearing,
and found it no more a clearing. Indeed so changed was it, that for
weeks I had passed close by without a thought of the jungle meadow of
the previous year, and now, what finally turned me aside from my usual
trail, was a sound. Twelve months ago I wrote, "From the monotone of
under-world sounds a strange little rasping detached itself, a
reiterated, subdued scraping or picking. It carried my mind instantly
to the throbbing theme of the Niebelungs, onomatopoetic of the little
hammers forever busy in their underground work. I circled a small bush
at my side, and found that the sound came from one of the branches
near the top; so with my glasses I began a systematic search." This
was as far as I ever got, for a flock of parrakeets exploded close at
hand and blew the lesser sound out of mind. If I had stopped to guess
I would probably have considered the author a longicorn beetle or some
fiddling orthopter.

[Footnote 2: See page 34.]

Now, a year later, I suddenly stopped twenty yards away, for at the
end of the silvery cadence of a woodhewer, I heard the low, measured,
toneless rhythm which instantly revived to mind every detail of the
clearing. I was headed toward a distant palm frond beneath whose tip
was a nest of Rufous Hermits, for I wished to see the two atoms of
hummingbirds at the moment when they rolled from their _petit pois_
egg-shells. I gave this up for the day and turned up the hill, where
fifty feet away was the stump and bush near which I had sat and
watched. Three times I went past the place before I could be certain,
and even at the last I identified it only by the relative position of
the giant tauroneero tree, in whi