Evolution and wildlife Galapagos

It is not difficult to see or discover an unknown animal. Spend a day in the tropical forest of South America, turning over logs, looking beneath barks, sifting through the moist litter of leaves, followed by an evening shining a mercury light on a white screen, and one way and another you will collect hundreds of different kinds of small creatures. Moths, caterpillars, spiders, long-nosed bugs, harmless butterflies disguised as wasps, wasps shaped like ants, stick that walk, leaves that opens wings and fly. The varieties are so many and one of these creatures is or will almost certainly be un-described by science. The difficulty will be to find a specialist who knows enough about the groups concerned to be able to single out new ones. No one can say just how many species of animals there are in these greenhouse-humid dimly lit jungles. They contain the richest and the most varied assemblage of animal and plant life to be found anywhere on the earth. Not only are there many major categories of creatures------monkeys, spiders, rodents, apes, birds, cats, hummingbirds, butterflies-but most of these types exists in many different forms. Accordingly there are well over forty different types or species of parrot, over seventy different types of monkeys, three hundred Hummingbirds and tens of thousands of butterflies. If you are not careful, you can be bitten by a hundred kinds of mosquito. The theory of evolution. The concept of it In 1832 a young Englishman, Charles Darwin, twenty-four years old and a naturalist on HMS Beagle, a brig sent by the Admiralty in London on a surveying voyage round the world, came to such a place, a forest outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. In one day, in one small area, he collected sixty-four different species of small beetle. That there should be such a variety of species of one kind astounded him. He had not been specially searching for them, as he wrote in his journal.’ Despite taken a degree in divinity in Cambridge—he was deeply perplexed and puzzled by the enormous multiplicity of life forms.’