410 A ZOOGEOGRAPHIC SCHEME FOR THE MID-PACIFIC, 



which once reached Fiji, and was killed by the natives. "It was 

 the tirst animal of the kiixl the natives had ever seen or heard 

 of."* 



It is probable that both the land birds and the Lepidoptera 

 were blown to the Ellice Group. P»om facts which he advances, 

 especially their absence from Fiji and the Solomons, Woodford 

 concludes! that Retnigia translata,C ej^honodes hylas, and Chloanges 

 spiralis reached the Gilberts from Eastern Asia by way of the 

 Marshall Group. When we add that they passed on from the 

 Gilberts to the Ellice, we but take another step along the same 

 path. It is noteworthy how the thoughts of two such excellent 

 naturalists as Guppy and Woodford, who gained their knowledge 

 of the Pacific on the spot, independently agree in tracing the 

 same path of migration for plants and insects respectively. Were 

 we in doubt as to the last step between the Gilberts and Ellice 

 taken by migrating butterflies, it should be removed by Kotzelme, 

 who when precisely midway between the two archipelagoes wrote 

 ■ — "When we were exactly in 4° 15' latitude and 178° longitude, 

 heavy gales brought swarms of butterflies and small land-birds to 

 the ship; we must therefore have been near land, but we looked 

 for it in vain; and this discovery remains for some future 

 navigator. "J 



The birds blown from atoll to atoll in the way the foregoing 

 passage describes, would be themselves the unconscious vehicle 

 of small animals or plants. J. J. Lister writes — " At Canton 

 Island a clump of Tournefortia trees was habitually used by these 

 birds (Sula piscatrix) as a roosting and preening place. Among 

 the pieces of down which were sticking to the Ijare branches 

 having been preened out of the feathers, was found one entangled 

 with a seed of one of the trailing plants of the island ( Boerhavia 

 tetrandra, Forster), which is beset with glandular hairs. Such an 



* Mariner— Tonga Islands, i. 1817, p. 337. 



+ Woodford, loc. cit. 



1 Kotzebue— A New Voyage Round the World, i. 1830, p. 292. 



