LIFE ON THE AMAZON

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 57, 4 September 1926, Page 20

LIFE ON THE AMAZON

SOME STRANGE FACTS.

Truth is. stranger than fiction, and lying, as it does, deep down in a well, it is by no means.dry. The world we live in is so full of fascinating facts that there is" never any need for fantasy. Let me take at random from my notebook some facts and figures concerning places I have visited ; (writes Scotland Liddell in the "English Beview"). First of all, a cruise upon that most interesting waterway, the Amazon. The Thames is 200 miles .in length; the Amazon, at its mouth, is more than 200 miles in.width. I tailed 1000 miles up the Amazon in an ocean liner. The British light cruiser Pelorus steamed to Iquitos in Peru—a distance of 2272 miles up-stream. The cruiser could have gone. 500 miles still farther up. A launch drawing 4Jft of water can travel 100 miles in a direct line up the Amazon' system at low water,. On the Amazon and its tributaries, at low water, the- game launch can sail more thaii 55,000 miles by known waterways. At high water double that distance. Ten miles from Manoas, Agassiz found 1500 varieties of fish in one small lake. Of these most were unknown to science. Compare* this with the 250 varieties of fish found in European rivers! In the same region, Bates, the entomologist, found 14,712 various insects, of which 8000 were unknown. Could any flight of fancy improve upon these facts? "When I was in New Zealand I met a man in Rotorua who was a keen angler. Ho assured me that his catch of trout the previous year had weighed nearly two tons I So large are tho fish and so plentiful that many anglers count their annual catches by tho ton. Not many miles from Rotorua, in the thermal district, I stood upon the banks of a trout stream. A yard or so away were bubbling pools of boiling water, so that it was possible to hook a trout and swing it round until it plopped into a boiling pool, there ,to be cooked.