EXTERMINATION 219 
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 writers 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 would 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 trace 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 aua 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.1 And yet the period just 
1 One of the survivors (a Parrakeet), now regarded by Count T. Salvadori as 
the true Conwrus pertinax, 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. 
