EX TERMINA TION 2 1 9 



ravages. We cannot read the accounts not merely of the earliest 

 voyages to the Antilles, but even of those performed within the last 

 hundred years, without being aware that the ^vriters met with many 

 birds which are not now known to inhabit them. These lost 

 species, there is some ground for believing, were mainly, if not 

 wholly, peculiar to the locality, and after having made good their 

 existence, maybe, for ages, fell easy and helpless victims to the 

 forces which European civilization brought into play. Chief among 

 these forces was fire. In all countries and at all times it has been 

 the habit of colonists, as before hinted, to burn the woods surround- 

 ing their settlements — partly to clear the ground for future crops, 

 and partly (in tropical climates especially) to promote the salubrity of 

 their stations. When fire was set to the forest and bush of a small 

 island, the whole of which could be burned at once, the disastrous 

 effect on its Fauna can easily be conceived. Even the animals which 

 happened to escape the conflagration itself Avould speedily starve, 

 owing to the at least temporary destruction of the native Flora 

 whence, either directly or indirectly, they derived their wonted 

 sustenance. Thus in certain of the Virgin Islands the " dead " 

 shells of many species of terrestrial Gasteropods are everywhere 

 found in astounding numbers, while not a living individual of 

 several of the species has ever been met with by the conchologists 

 of our day. The only assignable cause of the extinction of these 

 creatures lies in the fact that these islands are known to have been 

 laid waste by fire. The shells have resisted destruction, but how 

 many more animals have perished without leaving a ti-ace of their 

 existence % Even at the present time, few parts of the world so over- 

 run by people of European descent are from a naturalist's point of 

 view so little known as the West-India Islands. Still less is known 

 of their state a century ago ; and it would be a long and wearisome 

 task to collect from old voyages the meagre, scattered, and often inac- 

 curate information they contain as to the zoology of these islands. 

 One example may, perhaps, be sufficient. Ledru accompanied an 

 expedition sent out in 1796 by the French Government to the West 

 Indies. In his work he gives a list of the birds he found in the 

 islands of St. Thomas and St. Croix {Voyage mix Isles de Teneriffe, &c., 

 Paris: 1810, ii. p. 29). He enumerates fourteen kinds of birds as 

 having occurred to him there. Of these there is now no trace of 

 eight of the number ; and, if he is to be believed, it must be supposed 

 that within fifty or sixty years of his having been assured of their 

 existence, they have become extinct.^ And yet the period just 



^ One of the survivors (a Parrakeet), now regarded by Count T. Salvador! as 

 the true Conurus 2yertinax, is or was a few years ago restricted to a single hill-top 

 in St. Thomas, and so reduced in numbers that the present writer was ridiculed by 

 many of the inhabitants for believing that such a bird ever existed in the island. 

 Found, however, it was, but it must be regarded as verging upon extinction. 



