MY ISLANDS. 7 



natural selection totally distinct specific forms. (You 

 see, I have quite mastered your best modern scientific 

 vocabulary.) For instance, there were at first no insects 

 of any sort on the islands ; and so those plants which 

 in Europe depended for their fertilisation upon bees or 

 butterflies had here either to adapt themselves somehow 

 to the wind as a carrier of their pollen or else to die out 

 for want of crossing. Again, the number of enemies 

 being reduced to a minimum, these early plants tended 

 to lose various defences or protections they had acquired 

 on the mainland against slugs or ants, and so to become 

 different in a corresponding degree from their European 

 ancestors. The consequence was that by the time you 

 men first discovered the archipelago no fewer than forty 

 kinds of plants had so far diverged from the parent 

 forms in Europe or elsewhere that your savants con- 

 sidered them at once as distinct species, and set them 

 down at first as indigenous creations. It amused me 

 immensely. 



For out of these forty plants thirty-four were to my cer- 

 tain knowledge of European origin. I had seen their seeds 

 brought over by the wind or waves, and I had watched 

 them gradually altering under stress of the new 

 conditions into fresh varieties, which in process of time 

 became distinct species. Two of the oldest were 

 flowers of the dandelion and daisy group, provided with 

 feathery seeds which enable them to fly far before the 

 carrying breeze ; and these two underwent such pro- 

 found modifications in their insular home that the 

 systematic botanists who at last examined them insisted 

 upon putting each into a new genus, all by itself, 



