THROUGH EUROPE AND TO THE ISLANDS OP THE ATLANTIC. 165 
College we were quite familiar with it as indigenous to the old 
Windsor Forest country, and you may find references to it in the 
writings of Charles Kingsley. 
Sir J oseph Hooker, in the Students’ Flora of the British Islands, gives 
it a wide range, so as to include Europe (North and South), as 
well as tropical Africa, parts of Asia, and tropical America. 
Mr. Martin L. Rouse, B.L. — The submarine plateau of Western 
Africa (which our Secretary has studied to so good account) does 
indeed overlap nearly the whole of the Canary group of islands, 
about 150 miles being the limit at which it reaches the 2,000 
fathom edge of the abyss ; but, even if it has outliers reaching to 
the bases of the Madeira Islands, it can have none extending to the 
Azores, which are about 700 miles further off. And, after all, it is 
only the fauna of the Azores whose origin is in dispute ; for the 
Spaniards and Portuguese found the Guanches to have inhabited 
the Canary Islands from a remote period before their own arrival. 
Yet because it is inferred from the names given to three of the 
Azores by their first Genoese discoverers in A.D. 1385, that they 
were already inhabited by rabbits, pigeons, and goats respectively, 
it is further inferred that those creatures could not have been 
carried thither by the hand of man, but must have arrived there at 
a time when the islands were connected with the mainland. 
Now it would be rather strange if the Phoenicians, who under 
Pharaoh Necho’s orders sailed right round Africa, or their Cartha- 
ginian kinsfolk, who, under Hanno, sailed as far as Cape Verd, and 
were wont to trade with the Fortunate Islands, or Canaries, had 
never reached the Azores ; and, accordingly, I have heard the late 
Doctor Daniel Wilson, the noted anthropologist (in a public lecture 
wherein he sought to prove that the Carthaginians were the 
improvers of the civilization of Mexico) cite as evidence the fact 
that Carthaginian coins had been discovered on the Azores ; which is 
a proof, not of a mere passing call, but either of a shipwreck or of 
a settlement by Carthaginian mariners — a settlement brought to an 
end, no doubt, by some unexpected event. Now, even if a settle- 
ment was not intended, but the landing was the result of shipwreck, 
it is not unlikely that goats had been carried by the Carthaginian 
ship or fleet, and then landed in the island. In the days when 
condensed milk was unknown, it was a natural thing to carry goats 
on board ship ; they would stand the rough life where cows would 
