The Galapagos Islands

Eli Schuster's View:

Synopsis: (Extract from Voyage of the Beagle) Charles Darwin hangs out with lizards and giant tortoises on the Galapagos Islands, and later visits Tahiti as part of a five-year scientific journey in the 1830s.

What I learned: The snakes on the Galapagos Islands are harmless, and there aren't any frogs or toads. Young tortoises make excellent soup.

Memorable Line: "The inhabitants, when walking in the lower district, and overcome with thirst, often take advantage of this circumstance, by killing a tortoise, and if the bladder is full, drinking its contents. In one I saw killed, the fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste. The inhabitants, however, always drink first the water in the pericardium, which is described as being best." (Darwin on the subject of big tortoise bladders)

You Might Like This Book If: you remind people of this guy.

Line I Wasn't Expecting: "They forget, or will not remember, that human sacrifices, and the power of an idolatrous priesthood - a system of profligacy unparalleled in the world, and infanticide a consequence of that system - bloody wars, where the conquerors spared neither women nor children - that all these have been abolished; and that dishonesty, intemperance, and licentiousness have been greatly reduced by the introduction of Christianity." (Darwin, the father of Evolution, defending the introduction of Christianity into Tahiti).

Oopsy Daisy: "it never occurred to me, that the production of islands only a few miles apart, and placed under the same physical conditions, would be dissimilar. I therefore did not attempt to make a series of specimens from the separate islands."