MY ISLANDS. 9 



for each new plant, insect, or bird that established itself 

 successfully tended to make the balance of nature more 

 similar to the one that obtained in the mainland oppo- 

 site, and so decreased the chances of novelty of variation. 



Hence, it struck me that the oldest arrivals were the 

 ones which altered most in adaptation to the circumstan- 

 ces, while the newest, finding themselves in comparatively 

 familiar surroundings, had less occasion to be selected 

 for strange and curious freaks or sports of form or 

 colour. 



The peopling of the islands with birds and animals, 

 however, was to me even a more interesting and en- 

 grossing study in natural evolution than its peopling by 

 plants, shrubs, and trees. I may as well begin, there- 

 fore, by telling you at once that no furry or hairy quad- 

 ruped of any sort no mammal, as I understand your 

 men of science call them was ever stranded alive upon 

 the shores of my islands. For twenty or thirty centuries 

 indeed, I waited patiently, examining every piece of 

 driftwood cast up upon our beaches, in the faint hope 

 that perhaps some tiny mouse or shrew or water-vole 

 might lurk half drowned in some cranny or crevice of the 

 bark or trunk. But it was all in vain. I ought to have 

 known beforehand that terrestrial animals of the higher 

 types never by any chance reach an oceanic island in any 

 part of this planet. The only three specimens of mam- 

 mals I ever saw tossed up on the beach were two 

 drowned mice and an unhappy squirrel, all as dead as 

 doornails, and horribly mauled by the sea and the 

 breakers. Nor did we ever get a snake, a lizard, a frog, 

 or a fresh-water fish, whose eggs I at first fondly 



