... animals there are in these greenhouse- humid dimly lit jungles. They contain the richest and most varied assemblage of animal and plant life to be found anywhere on earth. Not only are there many major categories of creatures - monkeys, rodents, spiders, hummingbirds, butterflies - but most of these types exist in many different forms. There are over forty different species of Parrot, over seventy different monkeys, three hundred hummingbirds and tens of thousands of butterflies. If you are not careful, you can even be bitten by a hundred different types of mosquito. In 1832, a young Englishman, Charles Darwin,twenty-four years old and naturalist on HMS Beagle, a brig sent by the Admilarity in London on a surveying voyage round the world, came to such a forest just outside Rio de Janeiro. In one day, in a very small area he collected sixty-eight different species of small beetle. The fact that there ...

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