8 MY ISLANDS. 



invented for the special purpose of their reception. 

 One almost equally ancient inhabitant, a sort of hare- 

 bell, also became in process of time extremely unlike 

 any other harebell I had ever seen in any part of my airy 

 wanderings. But the remaining thirty new species or so 

 evolved in the islands by the special circumstances of the 

 group had varied so comparatively little from their 

 primitive European ancestors, that they hardly deserved 

 to be called anything more than very distinct and 

 divergent varieties. 



Some five or six plants, however, I noted arrive in my 

 archipelago, not from Europe, but from the Canaries or 

 Madeira, whose distant blue peaks lay dim on the 

 horizon far to the south-west of us, as I poised in mid- 

 air high above the topmost pinnacle of my wild craggy 

 Pico. These kinds, belonging to a much warmer region, 

 soon, as I noticed, underwent considerable modification 

 in our cooler climate, and were all of them adjudged 

 distinct species by the learned gentlemen who finally 

 reported upon my island realm to British science. 



As far as I can recollect, then, the total number of 

 flowering plants I noted in the islands before the arrival 

 of man was about 200 ; and of these, as I said before, 

 only forty had so far altered in type as to be considered 

 at present peculiar to the archipelago. The remainder 

 were either comparatively recent arrivals or else had 

 found the conditions of their new home so like those of 

 the old one from which they migrated, that compara- 

 tively little change took place in their forms or habits. 

 Of course, just in proportion as the islands got stocked 

 1 noticed that the changes were less and less marked ; 



