20 MY ISLANDS. 



known among human beings in modern times as the 

 Azores ; and also that traces of all these curious facts 

 of introduction and modification, which T have detailed 

 here in their historical order, may still be detected by an 

 acute observer and reasoner in the existing condition of 

 the fauna and flora. Indeed, one of your own country- 

 men, Mr. Goodman, has collected all the most salient 

 of these facts in his ' Natural History of the Azores/ and 

 another of your distinguished men of science, Mr. Alfred 

 Eussel Wallace, has given essentially the same explana- 

 tions beforehand as those which I have here ventured to 

 lay, from another point of view, before a critical human 

 audience. But while Mr. Wallace has arrived at them 

 by a process of arguing backward from existing facts to 

 prior causes and probable antecedents, it occurred to me, 

 who had enjoyed such exceptional opportunities of 

 watching the whole process unfold itself from the very 

 beginning, that a strictly historical account of how I had 

 seen it come about, step after step, might possess for 

 some of you a greater direct interest than Mr. Wallace's 

 inferential solution of the self -same problem. If, through 

 lapse of memory or inattention to detail at so remote a 

 period, I have set down aught amiss, I sincerely trust 

 you will be kind enough to forgive me. But this little 

 epic of the peopling of a single oceanic archipelago by 

 casual strays, which I alone have had the good fortune 

 to follow through all its episodes, seemed to me too 

 unique and valuable a chapter in the annals of life to be 

 withheld entirely from the scientific world of your eager, 

 ephemeral, nineteenth century humanity. 



