4 bulletin: museum of comparative zoology. 



been carried to Easter Island in several ways; they may have been 

 landed from some vessel passing, toward the straits or to round the Cape, 

 on its way to the Atlantic, — as we suppose some of the same species 

 have been taken to both western and eastern coasts of South America, 

 — in times more recent than the arrival of the islanders now in occu- 

 pancy, or the saurians may have been brought with the natives when they 

 came. Ethnologists having failed, so far, to determine the original 

 home of the people from racial characteristics and language, or from 

 their art as seen in the sculptures, and tablets, etc., the hypothesis is 

 permissible, from even so attenuated a thread of evidence as that sup- 

 plied by the reptiles, that when the men came the lizards came with 

 them. Beyond this it might be possible to account at once for the 

 undiflferentiated condition of the species and for the lack of energy and 

 of art in the present inhabitants of Easter Island by a further supposi- 

 tion that the makers of the images and the tablets were swept away by 

 the latest eruption of the volcano, and that their successors with the 

 lizards are the result of a subsequent migration from the Hawaiian 

 Islands or thereabout, an indirect route for the reptiles, as for man, 

 from central Polynesia. 



At the first glance various features of Easter Island combine to make 

 the study of its fauna appear to be one of particular attractiveness to 

 the naturalist : such are position, origin, isolation, extent, diversity, and 

 climate; it lies near the middle of the South Pacific (Lat. 27° 10' S. ; 

 Lon. 109° 26' W.) ; it originated as a volcano, without connection with 

 other land ; it has an area of about thirty -four square miles ; it possesses 

 plains, hills, and mountains (to 1700 feet), and it is covered with vege- 

 tation. A sense of disappointment comes upon one when in the course of 

 his investigations he realizes how much the island lacks age, that its birth 

 has been too recent for the evolution of species and varieties in a fauna 

 of its own, when he decides that what^ is possessed it has borrowed in 

 times not very remote and that he must direct his attention to the route 

 by which it was brought. Possibly more than one start was made by 

 flora and fauna to be destroyed by later activity of the expiring volcano ; 

 at any rate eruptive evidences confine the natural history within com- 

 paratively narrow limits of time. All of the literary history is decidedly 

 new; it begins with Davis's alleged discovery, 1686, though the little he 

 contributes to knowledge is not positively located and may have per- 

 tained to some other islet. Eoggewein, April 7, 1722, discovered the 

 island, named it, and furnished a general description with some infor- 



