170 
ARE SOILS ENRICHED, IMPOVERISHED, [Part III. 
“ The archipelago is a little world within itself. 
One is astonished at the amount of creative 
force displayed on so many small, barren, and 
rocky islands, and still more so at its diverse, 
yet analogous, action on points so near each 
other. I have said that the Galapagos archi¬ 
pelago might be called a satellite attached to 
America; but it should rather be called a group 
of satellites, physically similar, organically dis¬ 
tinct, yet intimately related to each other, 
and all related in a marked, though much lesser, 
degree to the great American continent.” 
But the plan of the Great Creator seems, in 
all time, and in all terrestrial space, to have gone 
on “ qualis ab incepto processerit; ” and as he has 
subjected individuals to death by years, so he 
has made species mortal by geological change of 
physical conditions. Nay, he has made their 
actual local habitations mortal. He has through¬ 
out all time made continents to come and to go, 
— to have a birth, life, death, and burial. He 
wields the mighty power of subterranean igneous 
action, in raising them into hypaethral existence; 
and, as if to show their nothingness in his hands, 
he redeposits them in the subaqueous regions by 
the quiet action of the rain-drop from heaven, or, 
at his will, he places his all-mighty finger on the 
mountain-top, and submerges it bodily below 
