Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/12

 a restless curiosity or unappeasable thirst of knowledge, treads with adventurous but cautious steps: like him strangers in those elevated regions, their presence shows us that the more flexible organization of animal creation can subsist far beyond the limits at which vegetation ceases. The condor,[2] the giant of the Vulture tribe, often soared over our heads above all the summits of the Andes, at an altitude higher than would be the Peak of Teneriffe if piled on the snow-covered crests of the Pyrenees. The rapacity of this powerful bird attracts him to these regions, whence his far-seeing eye may discern the objects of his pursuit, the soft-wooled Vicunas, which, wandering in herds, frequent, like the Chamois, the mountain pastures adjacent to the regions of perpetual snow.

But if the unassisted eye sees life distributed throughout the atmosphere, when armed with the microscope we discover far other marvels. Rotiferæ, Brachionæ, and a multitude of microscopic animalculæ, are carried up by the winds from the surface of evaporating waters. These minute creatures, motionless and apparently dead, are borne to and fro in the air until the falling dews bring them back to the surface of the earth, dissolve the film or envelope which encloses their transparent rotating bodies,[3] and, probably by means of the oxygen which all waters contain, breathe new irritability into their dormant organs.

According to Ehrenberg's brilliant discovery, the yellow sand or dust which falls like rain on the Atlantic near the Cape de Verde Islands, and is occasionally carried even to Italy and Middle Europe, consists of a multitude of siliceous