264 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



Godman, who has given us the most recent and accurate 

 information on the natural history of these islands, informs 

 us (in his paper on the Birds of the Azores in the Ibis 

 for 1866) that the stormy atmosphere, to which we have 

 seen that Madeira owes so many of its peculiarities, is 

 still more marked a feature of the Azores, where violent 

 storms from all points of the compass are frequent, and 

 annually bring to their shores numbers of European birds. 

 As a natural result of this constant influx, the birds of the 

 islands are, all but two, of European species ; and, what 

 is very important, they decrease in numbers from the 

 eastern to the western islands of the group. This is just 

 what we should expect if they are stragglers from the 

 eastern continent ; but if they are the descendants of 

 those which inhabited the country before its dismember- 

 ment, there would be no meaning in such a diminution. 

 Now we can hardly doubt that these same storms also 

 bring Coleoptera and other insects to the Azores, though 

 it may be more rarely and in smaller numbers than in the 

 case of birds ; and the large proportion of European 

 species will then be very intelligible. The same explana- 

 tion is suggested by the proportions of the most important 

 groups, for while (after deducting all those species believed 

 to have been introduced by man) the Geodephaga and 

 Brachelytra are by far the most numerous, the Rhyncho- 

 phora and the Heteromera are exceedingly few, a distribu- 

 tion which corresponds with their respective powers of 

 flight. It is also a very important fact that only four non- 

 introduced species can be traced to an American origin, 

 while more than a hundred are European ; since it shows 

 of how little importance are ocean currents as a means of 

 conveying insects over a wide extent of sea ; whereas the 

 great mass of the non-introduced species have evidently 

 passed through the air, aided by their powers of flight, for 

 a distance of about a thousand miles from Europe. The 

 Azorean Elateridse form a curious feature of its fauna, con- 

 sidering that the whole family is almost absent from 

 Madeira and the Canaries. Of the six species two are 

 European (one specially Portuguese), so that they may have 

 been introduced with living plants. Two are common 



