520 
ST. HELENA 
CHAP. 
plain “ is covered with fine sward, and is become the finest 
piece of pasture on the island.” The extent of surface, prob¬ 
ably covered by wood at a former period, is estimated at no less 
than two thousand acres ; at the present day scarcely a single 
tree can be found there. It is also said that in 1709 there 
were quantities of dead trees in Sandy Bay ; this place is now 
so utterly desert that nothing but so well-attested an account 
could have made me believe that they could ever have grown 
there. The fact that the goats and hogs destroyed all the 
young trees as they sprang up, and that in the course of time 
the old ones, which were safe from their attacks, perished from 
age, seems clearly made out. Goats were introduced in the 
year 1502; eighty - six years afterwards, in the time of 
Cavendish, it is known that they were exceedingly numerous. 
More than a century afterwards, in 1731, when the evil was 
complete and irretrievable, an order was issued that all stray 
animals should be destroyed. It is very interesting thus to 
find that the arrival of animals at St Helena in 1501 did not 
change the whole aspect of the island, until a period of two 
hundred and twenty years had elapsed : for the goats were 
introduced in 1502, and in 1724 it is said “the old trees had 
mostly fallen.” There can be little doubt that this great 
change in the vegetation affected not only the land-shells, 
causing eight species to become extinct, but likewise a multitude 
of insects. 
St. Helena, situated so remote from any continent, in the 
midst of a great ocean, and possessing a unique Flora, excites 
our curiosity. The eight land-shells, though now extinct, and 
one living Succinea, are peculiar species found nowhere else. 
Mr. Cuming, however, informs me that an English Helix is 
common here, its eggs no doubt having been imported in some 
of the many introduced plants. Mr. Cuming collected on the 
coast sixteen species of sea-shells, of which seven, as far as 
he knows, are confined to this island. Birds and insects, 1 as 
1 Among these few insects I was surprised to find a small Aphodius [nov. spec.) 
and an Oryctes, both extremely numerous under dung. When the island was 
discovered it certainly possessed no quadruped, excepting perhaps a mouse : it 
becomes, therefore, a difficult point to ascertain, whether these stercovorous insects 
have since been imported by accident, or if aborigines, on what food they formerly 
subsisted. On the banks of the Plata, where, from the vast number of cattle and 
horses, the fine plains of turf are richly manured, it is vain to seek the many kinds 
