1835.] DISTRIBUTION OF THE ORGANIC BEINGS. 398 
lies ;—thus there are 21 species of Composite, of which 20 are 
peculiar to this archipelago; these belong to twelve genera, and 
of these genera no less than ten are confined to the archi- 
pelago! Dr. Hooker informs me that the Flora has an undoubted 
Western American character; nor can he detect in it any affinity 
with that of the Pacific. If, therefore, we except the eighteen 
marine, the one fresh-water, and one Jand-shell, which nave 
apparently come here as colonists from the central islands of 
the Pacific, and likewise the one distinct Pacific species of 
the Galapageian group of finches, we see that this archipelago, 
though standing in the Pacific Ocean, is zoologically part of 
America. = 
If this character were owing merely to immigrants from Ame- 
rica, 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 geolo- 
gical 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 pe- 
culiar 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 organization? 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 phy- 
sically resemble the coast of America; yet the aboriginal inha- 
bitants 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 
