MY ISLANDS. 13 



germinating abundantly, gave rise to a whole valleyful 

 of appropriate plants for bullfinches to feed upon. Now, 

 however, there was no bullfinch to eat them. For a long 

 time, indeed, no other bullfinches arrived at my 

 archipelago. Once, to be sure, a few hundred years 

 later, a single cock bird did reach the island alone, much 

 exhausted with his journey, and managed to pick up a 

 living for himself off the seeds introduced by his unhappy 

 predecessor. But as he had no mate, he died at last, as 

 your lawyers would say, without issue. 



It was a couple of hundred years or so more before I 

 saw a third bullfinch which didn't surprise me, for 

 bullfinches are very woodland birds, and non-migratory 

 into the bargain so that they didn't often get blown 

 seaward over the broad Atlantic. At the end of that 

 time, however, I observed one morning a pair of finches, 

 after a heavy storm, drying their poor battered wings 

 upon a shrub in one of the islands. From this solitary 

 pair a new race sprang up, which developed after a time, 

 as I imagined they must, into a distinct species. These 

 local bullfinches now form the only birds peculiar to the 

 islands ; and the reason is one well divined by one of 

 your own great naturalists (to whom I mean before I 

 end to make the amende honorable). In almost all other 

 cases the birds kept getting reinforced from time to time 

 by others of their kind blown out to sea accidentally 

 for only such species were likely to arrive there and 

 this kept up the purity of the original race, by ensuring 

 a cross every now and again with the European com- 

 munity. But the bullfinches, being the merest casuals, 

 never again to my knowledge were reinforced from the 



