306 



ISLAND LIFE 



PAET II 



Madagascar or Mauritius round the Cape of Good Hope, 

 have been thrown on the shores of St. Helena and have 

 then sometimes germinated ! 



We have therefore little difficulty in understanding how 

 the island was first stocked with vegetable forms. When 

 it was so stocked (generally speaking), is equally clear. 

 For as the peculiar coleopterous fauna, of which an im- 

 portant fragment remains, is mainly composed of species 

 which are specially attached to certain groups of plants, we 

 may be sure that the plants were there long before the 

 insects could establish themselves. However ancient then 

 is the insect fauna the flora must be more ancient still. 

 It must also be remembered that plants, when once 

 established in a suitable climate and soil, soon take 

 possession of a country and occupy it almost to the 

 complete exclusion of later immigrants. The fact of so 

 many European weeds having overrun New Zealand and 

 temperate North America may seem opposed to this state- 

 ment, but it really is not so. For in both these cases the 

 native vegetation has first been artifically removed by man 

 and the ground cultivated ; and there is no reason to 

 believe that any similar effect would be produced by the 

 scattering of any amount of foreign seed on ground already 

 completely clothed with an indigenous vegetation. We 

 might therefore conclude a priori, that the flora of such an 

 island as St. Helena would be of an excessively ancient 

 type, preserving for us in a slightly modified form 

 examples of the vegetation of the globe at the time when 

 the island first rose above the ocean. Let us see then 

 what botanists tell us of its character and affinities. 



The truly indigenous flowering plants are about fifty in 

 number, besides twenty-six ferns. Forty of the former and 

 ten of the latter are absolutely peculiar to the island, and, 

 as Sir Joseph Hooker tells us, " with scarcely an exception, 

 cannot be regarded as very close specific allies of any other 

 plants at all. Seventeen of them belong to peculiar 

 genera, and of the others, all differ so markedly as species 

 from their congeners, that not one comes under the 

 category of being an insular form of a continental species." 

 The affinities of this flora are, Sir Joseph Hooker thinks, 



