SOME PLANT ENEMIES. 



103 



and either won or lost as the case might be. Those that 

 won and firmly established themselves were the fore- 

 runners of a " movement " which was to revolutionize 

 the existing flora of the island and make it eventually 

 what it is to-day. We need not doubt it — these early land- 

 plants put up an interesting and gallant fight. Even if we 

 exclude the original strand flora, they had many enemies. 



We are not aware if their influence has ever been noted 

 before by botanists, but we should imagine that the 

 iguanas which now exist in such numbers on Swan Island 

 must have been among the chief of these enemies. These 

 large lizards, of strictly vegetarian principles, had drifted 

 to the reef across miles of open sea, taking unconscious 

 advantage of floating trees or floating masses of vegetation, 

 which had been detached from other distant lands or 

 islands, as for instance Jamaica. Doubtless they thoroughly 

 enjoyed the young, succulent, and sprouting leaves of 

 the new plant colonists. Probably, too, they had their 

 predilections, and selected the young plants of those species 

 which specially appealed to them, such for instance as 

 possibly the Leguminosce, thereby exercising a selective 

 influence on the early vegetation of the islands. Shore 

 crabs, too, would soon have invaded the sandy shores of 

 this new-born scrap of land ; and since Mr. Guppy tells us 

 (loc. cit., p. 190) that they nibble off the shoots of germina- 

 ting seeds on the Cocos Keeling atoU ; it is not difficult to 

 imagine that they would soon have made their presence 

 felt here in determining what was to be successful or other- 

 wise in obtaining a footing on the island. 



Lastly, among likely, or obvious enemies, which we can 

 call to recollection,* would come a strange race of 

 vegetarian rats (Cap)'omys), tree-dwellers or tree-climbers, 

 and now almost extinct on other islands in the West Indies, 

 but which found their way across the sea to Swan Island 

 in the same fashion as the iguana, and there founded a 

 specific race of their own. 



*W« ignore the lamentable influence of goats, which could have played 

 no part in the early floral colonization of the islands. 



