How Animals Work PDF Download

Excerpt from How Animals Work In the following pages I have tried to present to my readers a point of view of the great realm of animal life which has not received so much attention as some others, and which I venture to believe will be found of considerable interest -namely, animals as craftsmen: as the builders of imperishable monuments that will long outlast the most magnificent ever conceived and executed by man; and as the artificers of the daintiest, most fairy-like structures, so frail as to last but a few short hours. Some of the most beautiful of these works are accomplished by creatures quite low down in the scale of animal life - creatures destitute of brain or vision, little better than mere blobs of protoplasmic jelly, yet gifted with selective powers of a high degree in the gathering of their building materials, and of extraordinary skill in the construction of their exquisite homes. The animal craftsman has many lessons to teach, and at the same time presents many interesting problems that have yet to be satisfactorily answered; while careful observations of the methods of working, of the materials used, and the design of the completed structure, as peculiar to closely related species, will often reveal unsuspected steps in the history of their evolution. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.