Word: elton
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Musine Diastole. This roster of rodentry was cited last week by Zoologist Charles Elton of Oxford University. In his 496-page study, Voles, Mice and Lemmings (Oxford; $10), Zoologist Elton investigates one of nature's strangest mysteries-why, all over the planet, hordes of such rodents pop up out of the earth from time to time. Small, silent, fleet, these musine masses scurry tirelessly among the grasses, destroying grain, trees, any other vegetation they can get their teeth into. Then they vanish from the desolated fields as if they had sunk back again into the earth, which remains sieved...
...only in the last 20 years have most scientists' eyes opened to the fact that these plagues are periodic, ebbing & flowing almost as regularly as the tides. Says Zoologist Elton: animal populations were formerly thought to be fairly stable, fluctuating only by chance. Now they are known to recur regularly, so that the biomass-"the living fabric of the world" -may be said to pulsate like the diastole and systole of a mighty heart...
...popular belief is that the lemmings' persistent dash to death is an instinctive longing for their former home in the sunken continent of Atlantis. But, notes Elton, the lemmings also surge eastward into the Baltic, northward into the Arctic. Not the whither but the whence, says Elton, explains the lemming migrations. Overcrowding and lack of food in their mountain homes move the lemmings to seek Lebensraum elsewhere. (A few reactionaries stay behind to breed the nucleus of another horde.) The lemmings are great swimmers, and since they have no way of knowing how vast the seas and oceans...
...major mystery is how the animals maintain their fixed cycles in spite of all such interference. Zoologist Elton concludes that the master factor is still unknown. He believes it may prove to be of a hitherto-undetected meteorological nature, hints at possible interstellar influences...
...YANKEE STARGAZER: THE LIFE OF NATHANIEL BOWDITCH - Robert Elton Berry-Whittlesey...