MY ISLANDS. 11 



whiten the distant mountains of central and northern 

 Europe, fell exhausted at last upon the shore of Terceira. 

 There were no insects then for the poor bird to feed 

 upon, so it died of starvation and weariness before the 

 day was out ; but a little earth that clung in a pellet to 

 one of its feet contained the egg of a land-shell, while 

 the prickly seed of a common Spanish plant was 

 entangled among the winged feathers by its hooked awns. 

 The egg hatched out, and became the parent of a large 

 brood of minute snails, which, outliving the cold spell of 

 the Ice Age, had developed into a very distinct type in 

 the long period that intervened before the advent of man 

 in the islands ; while the seed sprang up on the natural 

 manure heap afforded by the swallow's decaying body, 

 and clinging to the valleys during the Glacial Age on the 

 hill-tops, gave birth in due season to one of the most 

 markedly indigenous of our Terceira plants. 



Occasionally, too, very minute land-snails would 

 arrive alive on the island after their long sea-voyage on 

 bits of broken forest-trees a circumstance which I 

 would perhaps hesitate to mention in mere human 

 society were it not that I have been credibly informed 

 your own great naturalist, Darwin, tried the experiment 

 himself with one of the biggest European land-molluscs, 

 the great edible Eoman snail, and found that it still lived 

 on in vigorous style after immersion in sea-water for 

 twenty days. Now, I myself observed that several of 

 these bits of broken trees, torn down by floods in heavy 

 storm time from the banks of Spanish or Portuguese 

 rivers, reached my island in eight or ten days after 

 leaving the mainland, and sometimes contained eggs of 



