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I also had to employ at my own expense a pilot--no steamboat was allowed to go without one--whom I had to pay at the rate of L7 15_s._ sterling a day. A cook had to be employed for the crew, as none of the sailors could be induced to condescend to be the chef. Two applicants were eventually found. One who was willing to do the cooking at a salary of L3 10_s._ a day, his chief ability, said he, consisting in boiling rice and fish. Another fellow eventually undertook the job at a salary of L1 10_s._ a day, he being willing to do the cooking at such a small salary as he said he had never in his life cooked before, and he did not know whether we should care for his cooking or not. It must not for one moment be believed that these men were trying to cheat me, and putting on prices, for indeed these are the current rates for everybody who wishes to travel in those regions. The cost of commodities of any kind in Manaos was excessive, and went beyond even the limits of robbery. I went into a chemist's shop to purchase a small bottle of quinine tablets, worth in England perhaps eightpence or a shilling. The price charged there was L2 10_s._

The cave of Gailenreuth, in Bavaria, was explored by Dr. Goldfuss in 1810. He came to the conclusion that the bones of bears and other extinct animals were proofs of the former presence of the animals themselves. Dr. Buckland, a celebrated English writer, visited the cave in 1816, and became much interested in the work; so much so that when Kirkdale Cavern, in England, was discovered in 1821, he at once repaired to the spot and made a careful exploration. The results satisfied him that hyenas and other extinct animals had once lived in England. He followed up his explorations in a number of cases, and published a work on this subject in 1822, which marks the commencement of a new era in cave research.

In many of the Synaptidae the anchors are replaced by calcareous rods bent in the form of an S, which are said to act in the same way. Others, such as those of the genus Ankyroderma, have anchors which project considerably beyond the skin, and, according to Oestergren, serve "to catch plant-particles and other substances" and so mask the animal. Thus we see that in the Synaptidae the thick and irregular calcareous bodies of the Holothurians have been modified and transformed in various ways in adaptation to the footlessness of these animals, and to the peculiar conditions of their life, and we must conclude that the earlier stages of these changes presented themselves to the processes of selection in the form of microscopic variations. For it is as impossible to think of any origin other than through selection in this case as in the case of the toughness, and the "drip-tips" of tropical leaves. And as these last could not have been produced directly by the beating of the heavy raindrops upon them, so the calcareous anchors of Synapta cannot have been produced directly by the friction of the sand and mud at the bottom of the sea, and, since they are parts whose function is _passive_ the Lamarckian factor of use and disuse does not come into question. The conclusion is unavoidable, that the microscopically small variations of the calcareous bodies in the ancestral forms have been intensified and accumulated in a particular direction, till they have led to the formation of the anchor. Whether this has taken place by the action of natural selection alone, or whether the laws of variation and the intimate processes within the germ-plasm have cooeperated will become clear in the discussion of germinal selection. This whole process of adaptation has obviously taken place within the time that has elapsed since this group of sea-cucumbers lost their tube-feet, those characteristic organs of locomotion which occur in no group except the Echinoderms, and yet have totally disappeared in the Synaptidae. And after all what would animals that live in sand and mud do with tube-feet?

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