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This Book List Sectory 17
Page 12
In the evening, while we were sitting at dinner, there was a big bump. We had run aground somewhat heavily on a sand-dune. The captain rather frightened me as he said that on a previous occasion they had stuck on a sand-bank for several days before they could get off. As luck would have it that night, partly by the aid of a steel cable several hundred metres long, which had been fastened to a number of big trees on the shore, partly by her own power, we were able to back out and get her free. Only six hours were wasted. The tide, which reaches a long way up the Tapajoz River when the latter is low, helped us a great deal. At high tide the level of the water is raised more than one foot. It seemed amazing that the tide of the ocean could extend its influence by forcing the water back so far up the Amazon and its tributaries.
Nearly three hundred species of _Coleoptera_, or beetles, occupy similar positions. Almost any rotten log or stump when broken open discloses a half dozen or more "horn" or "bess beetles," _Passalus cornutus_ L., great, shining, clumsy, black fellows with a curved horn on the head. They are often utilized as horses by country children, the horn furnishing an inviting projection to which may be fastened, by a thread or cord, chips and pieces of bark to be dragged about by the strong and never lagging beast of burden. When tired of "playing horse" they can make of the insect an instrument of music; for, when held by the body, it emits a creaking, hissing noise, produced by rubbing the abdomen up and down against the inside of the hard, horny wing covers. This beetle passes its entire life in cavities in the rotten wood on which it feeds, and when it wishes a larger or more commodious home it has only to eat the more.
Memling (1425?-1495?), one of the greatest of the school, is another man about whose life little is known. He was probably associated with Van der Weyden in some way. His art is founded on the Van Eyck school, and is remarkable for sincerity, purity, and frankness of attitude. As a religious painter, he was perhaps beyond all his contemporaries in tenderness and pathos. In portraiture he was exceedingly strong in characterization, and in his figures very graceful. His flesh painting was excellent, but in textures or landscape work he was not remarkable. His best followers were Van der Meire (1427?-1474?) and Gheeraert David (1450?-1523). The latter was famous for the fine, broad landscapes in the backgrounds of his pictures, said, however, by critics to have been painted by Joachim Patinir. He was realistically horrible in many subjects, and though a close recorder of detail he was much broader than any of his predecessors.
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