520 ST. HELENA 



plain " is covered with fine sward, and is become the finest 

 piece of pasture on the island." The extent of surface, prob- 

 ably covered by \\ ood at a former period, is estimated at no less 

 than two thousand acres ; at the present day scarcely a single 

 tree can be found there. It is also said that in 1709 there 

 were quantities of dead trees in Sandy Bay ; this place is now 

 so utterly desert that nothing but so well-attested an account 

 could have made me believe that they could ever have grown 

 there. The fact that the goats and hogs destroyed all the 

 young trees as they sprang up, and that in the course of time 

 the old ones, which were safe from their attacks, perished from 

 age, seems clearly made out. Goats were introduced in the 

 year 1502; eighty - six years afterwards, in the time of 

 Cavendish, it is known that they were exceedingly numerous. 

 More than a century afterwards, in 1731, when the evil was 

 complete and irretrievable, an order was issued that all stray 

 animals should be destroyed. It is very interesting thus to 

 find that the arrival of animals at St. Helena in 1501 did not 

 change the whole aspect of the island, until a period of two 

 hundred and twenty years had elapsed : for the goats were 

 introduced in 1502, and in 1724 it is said "the old trees had 

 mostly fallen." There can be little doubt that this great 

 change in the vegetation affected not only the land -shells, 

 causing eight species to become extinct, but likewise a multitude 

 of insects. 



St. Helena, situated so remote from any continent, in the 

 midst of a great ocean, and possessing a unique Flora, excites 

 our curiosity. The eight land -shells, though now extinct, and 

 one living Succinea, are peculiar species found nowhere else. 

 Mr. Cuming, however, informs me that an English Helix is 

 common here, its eggs no doubt having been imported in some 

 of the many introduced plants. Mr. Cuming collected on the 

 coast sixteen species of sea-shells, of which seven, as far as 

 he knows, are confined to this island. Birds and insects,^ as 



1 Among these few insects I was surprised to find a small Aphodius {nov. spec.) 

 and an Oryctes, both extremely numerous under dung. When the island was 

 discovered it certainly possessed no quadruped, excepting perhaps a mouse : it 

 becomes, therefore, a difficult point to ascertain, whether these stercovorous insects 

 have since been imported by accident, or if aborigines, on what food they formerly 

 subsisted. On the banks of the Plata, where, from the vast number of cattle and 

 horses, the fine plains of turf are richly manured, it is vain to seek the many kinds 



