DISTRIBUTION OF THE ORGANIC BEINGS 419 



If this character were owing merely to immigrants from 

 America, there would be little remarkable in it ; but we see 

 that a vast majority of all the land animals, and that more 

 than half of the flowering plants, are aboriginal productions. 

 It was most striking to be surrounded by new birds, new 

 reptiles, new shells, new insects, new plants, and yet by 

 innumerable trifling details of structure, and even by the tones 

 of voice and plumage of the birds, to have the temperate plains 

 of Patagonia, or the hot dry deserts of Northern Chile, vividly 

 brought before my eyes. Why, on these small points of land, 

 which within a late geological period must have been covered 

 by the ocean, which are formed of basaltic lava, and therefore 

 differ in geological character from the American continent, and 

 which are placed under a peculiar climate, — why were their 

 aboriginal inhabitants, associated, I may add, in different 

 proportions both in kind and number from those on the 

 continent, and therefore acting on each other in a different 

 manner — why were they created on American types of 

 organisation ? It is probable that the islands of the Cape de 

 Verd group resemble, in all their physical conditions, far more 

 closely the Galapagos Islands than these latter physically 

 resemble the coast of America ; yet the aboriginal inhabitants 

 of the two groups are totally unlike ; those of the Cape de 

 Verd Islands bearing the impress of Africa, as the inhabitants of 

 the Galapagos Archipelago are stamped with that of America. 



I have not as yet noticed by far the most remarkable 

 feature in the natural history of this archipelago ; it is, that 

 the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by 

 a different set of beings. My attention was first called to this 

 fact by the Vice- Governor, Mr. Lawson, declaring that the 

 tortoises differed from the different islands, and that he could 

 with certainty tell from which island any one was brought. I 

 did not for some time pay sufficient attention to this statement, 

 and I had already partially mingled together the collections 

 from two of the islands. I never dreamed that islands, about 

 fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each 

 other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite 

 similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have 

 been differently tenanted , but we shall soon see that this is 



