William Beebe

No wonder David asked, what is man that you were mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him? But see, he is mindful of us and he cares for us.

William Beebe, the naturalist, used to tell the story about Teddy Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill, his family home, after talking for the evening, the two would go out on the lawn and search the skies for a certain spot of starlight light near the left-hand corner of the great square of Pegasus.

Then Roosevelt would recite, that is the spiral galaxy in Andromeda.

It is as large as our Milky Way.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Phil Schampf.

Jungle Night by William Beebe.

Part one.

Within gun reach in front of me trudged my little Akawai Indian hunter.

He set aside $60,000 to carry out an expedition of the pheasant.

And William Beebe was selected to head up this expedition.

He took a photographer with him, and they went to England, China, Japan, India, Borneo, and other countries where pheasants were known or believed to exist.

The result of that, over the next 10 years, he carried out this study, and he wrote a four-volume book, not only about true pheasants, but whatever is considered as a pheasant family.

Men have gone down to the depths of the sea before.

William Beebe in his bathysphere, you remember of course.

Bathysphere, we Greeks again.

Comes from bathos, depth.

For most of history, this realm was not just unknown, but considered unknowable.

In the 1930s, the naturalist William Beebe was lowered into the darkness off Bermuda in a tiny steel sphere called a bathysphere.

Peering through a thick quartz window, he saw fleeting, half-glimpsed creatures illuminated by their own internal light, the first human eyes to witness life in the deep.

It was a world that operated by different rules.

Getting away from marine animals, we may notice that associations which may be called commensalism are well known among insects.

Thus, Mr. William Beebe has recently discovered a minute blind cockroach, Attaphila, that lives in the subterranean nests of the Atta leafcutter ants.

They clean the bodies of the giant soldier ants and seem to do no harm in the nest.

We need not refer to other instances of commensalism which have been mentioned elsewhere in this work.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Phil Schampf.

Jungle Night by William Beebe.

Part 1.

Within gun reach in front of me trudged my little Akawai Indian hunter.