Down Under

«In short, there was no place in the world like it. There still isn't. Eighty per cent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else. More than this, it exists in an abundance that seems incompatible with the harshness of the environment. Australia is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically agressive of all the inhabited continents. (Only Antartica is more hostile to life.) This is a place so inert that even the soil is, technically speaking, a fossil. And yet it teemswith life in numbers uncounted. For insects alone, scientists haven´t the faintest idea whether the total number of species is 100.000 or more than twice that. As many as a third of those species remain entirely unknown to science. For spiders, the proportion rises to 80 per cent.»

Retirado do livro "DOWN UNDER" de Bill Bryson.


A versão portuguesa aparentemente está esgotada e por muito que tenha perguntado em quase todas as livrarias onde fui nos últimos meses não a consegui encontrar um exemplar que estivesse perdido nos stocks, por isso tive que ler a versão original. Deu para ter umas boas ideias, agora que é quase uma certeza...