XVII 
DISTRIBUTION OF THE ORGANIC BEINGS 
419 
If this character were owing merely to immigrants from 
America, there would be little remarkable in it ; but we see 
that a vast majority of all the land animals, and that more 
than half of the flowering plants, are aboriginal productions. 
It was most striking to be surrounded by new birds, new 
reptiles, new shells, new insects, new plants, and yet by 
innumerable trifling details of structure, and even by the tones 
of voice and plumage of the birds, to have the temperate plains 
of Patagonia, or the hot dry deserts of Northern Chile, vividly 
brought before my eyes. Why, on these small points of land, 
which within a late geological period must have been covered 
by the ocean, which are formed of basaltic lava, and therefore 
differ in geological character from the American continent, and 
which are placed under a peculiar climate,—why were their 
aboriginal inhabitants, associated, I may add, in different 
proportions both in kind and number from those on the 
continent, and therefore acting on each other in a different 
manner — why were they created on American types of 
organisation ? It is probable that the islands of the Cape de 
Verd group resemble, in all their physical conditions, far more 
closely the Galapagos Islands than these latter physically 
resemble the coast of America ; yet the aboriginal inhabitants 
of the two groups are totally unlike ; those of the Cape de 
Verd Islands bearing the impress of Africa, as the inhabitants of 
the Galapagos Archipelago are stamped with that of America. 
I have not as yet noticed by far the most remarkable 
feature in the natural history of this archipelago ; it is, that 
the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by 
a different set of beings. My attention was first called to this 
fact by the Vice-Governor, Mr. Lawson, declaring that the 
tortoises differed from the different islands, and that he could 
with certainty tell from which island any one was brought. I 
did not for some time pay sufficient attention to this statement, 
and I had already partially mingled together the collections 
from two of the islands. I never dreamed that islands, about 
fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each 
other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite 
similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have 
been differently tenanted ; but we shall soon see that this is 
