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CHAPTER XXV, 



TORTOISES AND TURTLES. 



The Galapagos — The Elephantine Tortoise — The Marsh-Tortoises — Mantega — 

 River-Tortoises — Marine-Turtles — On the Brazilian Coast — Their Numerous 

 Enemies — The Island of Ascension — Turtle -Catching at the Bahama and 

 Keeling Islands— Turtle caught by means of the Sucking-Eish — The Green 

 Turtle — The H'awksbill Turtle — Turtle Scaling in the Feejee Islands — Barbarous 

 mode of selling Turtle-flesh in Ceylon — The Coriaceous Turtle — Its awful 

 Shrieks. 



IN the South Sea, exposed to the vertical beams of the equa- 

 torial sun, lies a large group of uninhabited islands, on 

 whose sterile shores you would look in vain for the palms, 

 bananas, or bread-fruit trees of more favoured lands, as rain 

 falls only upon the heights, and never descends to call forth 

 plenty on the arid coasts. 



And yet, this desolate group offers many points of interest to 

 the naturalist, for the Galapagos or Tortoise Islands represent, 

 as it were, a little world in themselves, a peculiar creation of 

 animals and plants, reminding us, more strongly than the 

 productions of any other land, of an earlier epoch of planetary 

 life. Here are no less than twenty-six different species of land- 

 birds, which, with one single exception, are found nowhere else. 

 Their plumage is homely, like the flora of their native country ; 

 their tameness so great that they may 

 be killed with a stick. A sea-mew, 

 likewise peculiar to this group, mixes 

 its shriek with the hoarse-resounding 

 surge; lizards, existing in no other 

 countjy, swarm about the shore, and 

 the gigantic land-tortoise {Testudo 

 indica, elepltantina), although now spread over many other 

 countries, is supposed by Mr. Darwin to have had its original 



y 



AMBLVHHYXE. 



