132 
ST. HELENA. 
papers, which have appeared in the Annals and Magazine of 
Natural History for October, 1809, and December, 1871, demand a 
special reference for a study of the Coleoptera of St. Helena, 
since they contain much important matter in addition to what 
I have here quoted. The Beetles act a much larger part in the 
destruction of vegetation than at first sight appears, through their 
being nocturnal in their depredations ; but the leafless grape vines 
and perforated lace-like leaves of the loquat and oak trees at St. 
Helena plainly show how much mischief these little creatures are 
capable of working. In a scientific point of view, they form 
perhaps the most wonderful portion of this isolated insect fauna; 
and Mr. Wollaston writes on the subject as follows: “That 
a special interest should attach to the productions of any island 
which is unusually remote, I need scarcely state ; and when we 
recollect that St. Helena is about 1200 miles from the nearest point 
of the African continent, we shall at once acknowledge that, for the 
geographical naturalist, a more isolated field could hardly perhaps 
be found. The manifest deterioration of the Island, in a scientific 
point of view, during the last 300 years, is a subject on which I need 
not dilate ; for the primeval forests which are said to have more or 
less clothed it at its discovery have succumbed beneath the ruthless 
hand of ‘ civilization,’ — a few detached patches alone remaining, on 
the extreme summit and more inaccessible slopes, to harbour what is 
left of that noble fauna the fragments of which are so eccentric that 
one cannot but suspect the quondam occurrence of many intermediate 
links (now, in all probability, long exterminated) which must, as it 
were, have ‘ articulated them on’ to the recognised types with which 
we are familiar. Of course in an island of this kind, which has 
become intensely cultivated since the period of its colonization, we 
naturally should not expect to meet with many traces of its primeval 
species ; for the gradual rooting-out of the native vegetation, and 
the introduction, year after year, of more ‘useful’ plants (chiefly 
from European latitudes, but in the present instance, perhaps, partlv 
from the Cape of Gfood Hope), accompanied by their inevitable train 
of insect parasites, would so far alter the entire country as to destroy 
the apparent peculiarity of its productions, and give a mixed cha- 
racter to its fauna and flora to which aboriginally it had no kind of 
claim. Happily, however, in cases like this, when the species are 
brought fairly together, it is usually not difficult for a practised eye 
