365 Day Project: Day 92

A Spoon Dances in the Moonlight

Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882).?The Voyage of the Beagle.?

[Vol. 29, pp. 462-471 of The Harvard Classics]

Today’s reading was another excerpt from Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. I can now say this work has entered my Top 50 favorite books! There isn’t much more to share in this update that I haven’t already written about the book in prior posts, so I will leave you with my favorite passage from today’s reading.?

“The long swell caused by the gentle but steady action of the trade-wind, always blowing in one direction over a wide area, causes breakers, almost equalling in force those during a gale of wind in the temperate regions, and which never cease to rage. It is impossible to behold these waves without feeling a conviction that an island, though built of the hardest rock, let it be porphyry, granite, or quartz, would ultimately yield and be demolished by such an irresistible power. Yet these low, insignificant coral-islets stand and are victorious: for here another power, as an antagonist, takes part in the contest. The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime, one by one, from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will that tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month? Thus do we see the soft and gelatinous body of a polypus, through the agency of the vital laws, conquering the great mechanical power of the waves of an ocean which neither the art of man nor the inanimate works of nature could successfully resist.”

?Amazing.

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Resources

Kindle version of The Harvard Classics ($1.99):?https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089K4RP1F/