Books: The Animal Kingdom

HIGH JUNGLE (379 pp.)—William Beebe—Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($4.50).

Whether or not William Beebe’s discoveries put him among the great naturalists, his best books have as much charm and descriptive power as anything of the sort since Darwin’s Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. In Beebe’s career, High Jungle covers the Venezuelan phase, which began in 1945 after Beebe had abandoned his underseas adventures (during which he had successfully stared sharks out of countenance)* and returned to the job he loved best, the study of the jungle.

In the subtropical mountain rain forest, or “high jungle,” of Venezuela, Beebe’s zoologist-assistant Jocelyn Crane ran across a fantastic concrete hotel building that had been left to molder unfinished after the death, in 1935, of its builder, Dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. If Rancho Grande was in the jungle, the jungle was also in Rancho Grande—nesting in its crevices, pattering and pullulating in its chambers, making every wall “a landscape of mold and slime.” With the consent of the Venezuelan government and the support of the New York Zoological Society and the Creole Petroleum Corp., the Beebe expedition moved in.

A gasoline generator gave them light, and drying facilities for their laboratory and clothes. Investigating the riot of fungus, lichens, molds, smuts and mildews that festooned the place, Beebe discovered Protozoa, Coelenterata, Platyhelminthes, Nemathelminthes, and Rotifera, and was certain of the existence of Mollusca, Oligochaeta, Hirundinea and Arthropoda.

“Each of the above nine groups,” he tells the reader gently, “under modern scientific classification, are distinct major Phyla,-whereas we, and all our backboned brethren on the earth, from angelfish to apes, are all included in the single Phylum Vertebrata or Chordata.”

To get a laugh from Venezuelan vertebrates in the neighborhood, Beebe and company put up a sign reading “LABORATORIO: MANICOMO,” i.e., bughouse. Some of the natives watched with great interest as Beebe experimented with such insects as the Hercules beetles, six inches long, which outweigh some of the smallest mammals and fight with their horns like embittered rhinoceroses. Though ocelots hunted by night in the rooms of the Rancho Grande, and army ants on the march once had to be diverted from the laboratory by 20 gallons of flaming gasoline, Beebe firmly maintains that the jungle was as safe as a church. During the three years, 1945, 1946 and 1948, he experienced nothing worse than a broken leg —from a fall off a ladder.

For close observation Beebe (who will be 72 July 29), liked to squat motionless as a stump in the forest or sit for hours on the limb of a tree. For long-range work he used giant binoculars mounted on a tripod; with these he could make out the scent gland of the hind leg of a butterfly a quarter of a mile away. “I often wondered,” he says, in a sentence of purest Beebe, “what the soaring vultures, looking down, made of this strange creature with great tubular eyes and five legs.”

* Beebe says he has often been misquoted about sharks. He respects them, having once found a man’s arm in a shark’s stomach.