Woof! Now that’s what I call a quiz

Match these authors to their pets and spot the naturalist from their prose in Henry Eliot’s fiendish literary quiz

Each answer gives you a letter. Put them together to spell a view of nature.

Can you match these dogs with their owners?

__ Basket __ Boatswain __ Charley __ Flush __ Pinka

ANSWERS

D John Steinbeck

E Lord Byron

I Elizabeth Barrett Browning N Virginia Woolf

R Gertrude Stein natural history?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. ___

I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course – year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness. ___

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter. ___

The form of a coast, the configuration of the interior of a country, the existence and extent of lakes, valleys, and mountains, can often be traced to the former prevalence of earthquakes and volcanoes in regions which have long been undisturbed. ___

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed in a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. ___

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture – that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves. ___

ANSWERS

A On the Origin of Species,

Charles Darwin

C Silent Spring, Rachel Carson

D The Malay Archipelago,

Alfred Russel Wallace Principles of Geology,

Charles Lyell

N Walden, Henry David Thoreau W Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey

LHenry Eliot is the author of The Penguin Classics Book

OPPOSITES ATTRACT Paul Mescal And Daisy EdgarJones in Normal People; below, director Lenny Abrahamson