336 Murphy, Birds of Trinidad Islet. [july 



that the mothers, brooding over their young, only opened their 

 beaks in a menacing attitude at us, as we passed by them. 



" How to account satisfactorily for the simultaneous destruction 

 of this vast forest of trees was very difficult: there was no want of 

 rich earth for nourishment of the roots. The most probable cause 

 appeared to me, a sudden and continued eruption of sulphuric 

 effluvia from the volcano ; or else, by some unusually heavy gale of 

 wind or hurricane, the trees had been drenched with salt water to 

 their roots." 



The wood of these gnarled trees is hard and imperishable, so 

 that a similar condition obtains today, excepting that most of the 

 trunks have fallen to earth. Knight's account is not unlike that of 

 Captain Marryat; his conclusion also is the same: 



"The mountain slopes were thickly covered with dead wood — 

 wood, too, that had evidently long since been dead ; some of these 

 leafless trunks were prostrate, some still stood up as they had 

 grown .... When we afterwards discovered that over the whole 

 of this extensive island, from the beach up to the summit of the 

 highest mountain — at the bottom and on the slopes of every now 

 barren ravine, on whose loose-rolling stones no vegetation could 

 possibly take root — these dead trees were strewed as closely as it 

 is possible for trees to grow; and when we further perceived that 

 they all seemed to have died at one and the same time, as if plague- 

 struck, and that no single live specimen, young or old, was to be 

 found anywhere — our amazement was increased. 



" . . . . Looking at the rotten, broken-up condition of the rock, 

 and the nature of the soil, where there is a soil — a loose powder, 

 not consolidated like earth, but having the appearance of fallen 

 volcanic ash — I could not help imagining that some great eruption 

 had brought about all this desolation;. . . .1 think this theory a 

 more probable one than that of a long drought, a not very likely 

 contingency in this rather rainy region." 



Admitting a general impoverishment of vegetation, Copeland 

 has suggested a still more probable agency than recent volcanic 

 action. He asks whether the goats, introduced by Halley in 1700, 

 may not have destroyed the trees of Trinidad, as happened, ac- 

 cording to Darwin, to the trees of St. Helena. It has been pointed 

 out that such a theory would involve both a change of climate and 



