Science in Arcady | Page 3

this their almost lifeless
condition, was that the Gulf Stream and the trade winds from America
would bring the earliest higher plants and animals to our shores. But in

this I soon found I was quite mistaken. The distance to be traversed was
so great, and the current so slow, that the few seeds or germs of
American species cast up upon the shore from time to time were mostly
far too old and water-logged to show signs of life in such ungenial
conditions. It was from the nearer coasts of Europe, on the contrary,
that our earliest colonists seemed to come. Though the prevalent winds
set from the west, more violent storms reached us occasionally from the
eastward direction; and these, blowing from Europe, which lay so much
closer to our group, were far more likely to bring with them by waves
or wind some waifs and strays of the European fauna and flora.
I well remember the first of these great storms that produced any
distinct impression on my islands. The plants that followed in its wake
were a few small ferns, whose light spores were more readily carried on
the breeze than any regular seeds of flowering plants. For a month or
two nothing very marked occurred in the way of change, but slowly the
spores rooted, and soon produced a small crop of ferns, which, finding
the ground unoccupied, spread when once fairly started with
extraordinary rapidity, till they covered all the suitable positions
throughout the islands.
For the most part, however, additions to the flora, and still more to the
fauna, were very gradually made; so much so that most of the species
now found in the group did not arrive there till after the end of the
Glacial epoch, and belong essentially to the modern European
assemblage of plants and animals. This was partly because the islands
themselves were surrounded by pack-ice during that chilly period,
which interrupted for a time the course of my experiment. It was
interesting, too, after the ice cleared away, to note what kinds could
manage by stray accidents to cross the ocean with a fair chance of
sprouting or hatching out on the new soil, and which were totally
unable by original constitution to survive the ordeal of immersion in
the sea. For instance, I looked anxiously at first for the arrival of some
casual acorn or some floating filbert, which might stock my islands
with waving greenery of oaks and hazel bushes. But I gradually
discovered, in the course of a few centuries, that these heavy nuts never
floated securely so far as the outskirts of my little archipelago; and that

consequently no chestnuts, apple trees, beeches, alders, larches, or
pines ever came to diversify my island valleys. The seeds that did
really reach us from time to time belonged rather to one or other of four
special classes. Either they were very small and light, like the spores of
ferns, fungi, and club-mosses; or they were winged and feathery, like
dandelion and thistle-down; or they were the stones of fruits that are
eaten by birds, like rose-hips and hawthorn; or they were chaffy grains,
enclosed in papery scales, like grasses and sedges, of a kind well
adapted to be readily borne on the surface of the water. In all these
ways new plants did really get wafted by slow degrees to the islands;
and if they were of kinds adapted to the climate they grew and
flourished, living down the first growth of ferns and flowerless herbs in
the rich valleys.
The time which it took to people my archipelago with these various
plants was, of course, when judged by your human standards,
immensely long, as often the group received only a single new addition
in the lapse of two or three centuries. But I noticed one very curious
result of this haphazard and lengthy mode of stocking the country:
some of the plants which arrived the earliest, having the coast all clear
to themselves, free from the fierce competition to which they had
always been exposed on the mainland of Europe, began to sport a great
deal in various directions, and being acted upon here by new conditions,
soon assumed under stress of natural selection totally distinct specific
forms. (You see, I have quite mastered your best modern scientific
vocabulary.) For instance, there were at first no insects of any sort on
the islands; and so those plants which in Europe depended for their
fertilisation upon bees or butterflies had here either to adapt themselves
somehow to the wind as a carrier of their pollen or else to die out for
want of crossing. Again, the number of enemies being reduced to a
minimum, these early plants tended to lose various defences or
protections they had acquired