1 25 settlers— old and new 



actually happened. Until comparatively recently no one 

 even asked the questions in any rational form. 



For many years the late medieval herbalists v^ent about 

 northern Europe with a copy of an ancient Greek catalogue 

 in their hands trying to identify in Germany or Sweden 

 the flowers which the ancient author had found about the 

 Mediterranean. They were loath to realize that theirs was 

 what they would have thought of as a barbarous flora un- 

 known to tlie ancients and no doubt loath also to face the 

 fact that there was so much still to be learned. When the 

 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries finally did realize 

 something of the vast variety of living forms, they were 

 concerned first of all to describe and list as many of them 

 as possible, simply taking variety for granted. For them 

 one sort of animal or plant lived in one place and another 

 sort in another place because God had put them where 

 they belonged. Each was a "special creation." If they all 

 originated in the Garden of Eden then they must have 

 been scattered as the sons of Noah were scattered in order 

 that they might found the different races of mankind. 



Consider how simple and how picturesque the situation 

 was even as Linnaeus, child of an enlightened age, saw it. 

 And he is delightfully explicit on the subject. There is, so 

 he says, certainly more dry land now than there used to be. 

 Probably Eden was situated upon a single small island 

 while all the rest of the surface of the earth was under 

 water. On this island, God crowded at least a specimen 

 of every kind of plant or animal that now exists. Eden was 

 a kind of Noah's Ark or, as he puts it, "a living museum 

 of natural-history specimens." Linnaeus then concludes 

 that Adam must have been the most fortunate of mankind 



