I20 Charles Darwin. 



the young naturalist gave to a subject with which he 

 was then totally unfamiliar. 



His investigations at Keeling Island were not con- 

 fined to corals alone ; the natives, their ways and 

 customs, styles of dress, religious ideas, the atmos- 

 pheric conditions, the currents of the ocean, the 

 flora — in fact, every thing received attention. Dar- 

 win was in no sense a specialist ; every feature of 

 life, every page in the book of nature, was studied 

 with care and interest, and the amount of material 

 collected and the variety of facts obtained at every 

 place were astonishing. 



From these attractive coral islands the Beagle 

 sailed for Mauritius, where Darwin studied every 

 feature of life from the habits of the simplest insect 

 to what he considered the crime of slavery. Stop- 

 ping at St. Helena he noted the extinction of several 

 animals, and the cause — the denudation of vegeta- 

 tion. In his note-book he writes : " The history of the 

 changes which the elevated plains of Longwood and 

 Deadwood have undergone, is extremely curious. 

 Both plains, it is said, in former times were covered 

 with wood, and were therefore called the Great 

 Wood. So late as the year 1716 there were many 

 trees, but in 1724 the old trees had mostly fallen; 

 and as goats and hogs had been suffered to range 

 about, all the young trees had been killed. It 

 appears also from the official records that the trees 

 were unexpectedly, some years afterwards, succeeded 

 by a wire grass, which spread over the whole surface. 

 The extent of surface, probably covered by wood at 

 a former period, is estimated at no less than two 



