Word: elton
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...world is sick and the disease is skepticism. But now, unlike the Victorian era, it is not so much man's skepticism of God as man's skepticism of man. So declares David Elton Trueblood, 43, chaplain and professor of the philosophy of religion at Stanford University, in The Predicament of Modern Man (Harper...
...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...
Mouse Harvests. Sometimes the mice cycles lead to cycles of disaster throughout nature. "Northward, beyond the line where crops will flourish," says Elton, "the mice themselves become a crop, harvested in turn by fox and trapper and trader." From the reports of the Hudson's Bay Company and of Labrador missionaries Elton has found that in the last century fox catches fluctuated in four-year cycles, one year after the cycles of voles in Labrador and lemmings in Ungava (subArctic Quebec...