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KEFERENCE TO THE ORIGIN OF SRECIES. 



409 



Even in the present year (November 1867) a submarine 

 volcano lias bnrst out in tlie South. Pacific at a point 1,200 

 geographical miles from New Zealand and 1,800 from Aus- 

 tralia, between two of the most easterly islands of the Samoa 

 or Navigator's Group, an archipelago where there had been 

 no tradition of an eruption within the memory of man. This 

 outburst was preceded by numerous shocks of earthquakes. 

 Jets of mud and dense columns of volcanic sand and stones, 

 rising 2,000 feet, and the fearful crash of masses of rock 

 hurled upwards and coming in collision Avith others which 

 were falling, attested the great volume of ejected matter, 

 which accumulated in the bed of the ocean, although there 

 was no permanent protrusion of a new volcano above its level. 



General inferences to he deduced from the endemic and other 

 species of animals and plants in the Atlantic Islands. — Whether 

 therefore Ave consider the composition of the rocks and struc- 

 ture of the Atlantic islands, or their comparatively modern 

 origin, or the vast depth and extent of the sea which separates 

 them from the nearest continent, all these characters conspire 

 to lead to the belief that they have been formed in mid-ocean 

 by volcanic agency; and we shall find, if I mistake not, that the 

 geographical distribution of the species, both of animals and 

 plants, contained in them is far more in accordance with such 



■ 



an hypothesis than with that of continental extension. If, 

 when the first islands were formed, the earliest colonists con- 

 sisted of plants and animals which arrived as waifs and strays 

 from the nearest land, they mnst have consisted of species 

 which inhabited Europe and the North of Africa in Tipper 

 Miocene times. Fortunately we have made considerable pro- 

 gress in ascertaining what was the character of the fauna and 

 flora of that epoch, differing widely as it did from that now 

 existing in the same regions. We know, for example, that the 

 Miocene flora of Europe had a strong generic affinity to the 

 vegetation now characterising North America, much greater 

 than to that of any other part of the globe in our own period ; 

 so that, if we find American forms in these Atlantic islands, 

 it does not violate the general law that the animate creation 

 in oceanic archipelagos bears always most resemblance to that 

 of the nearest adjoining mainland, for these American forms 



