Science in Arcady | Page 4

on the mainland against slugs or ants, and
so to become different in a corresponding degree from their European
ancestors. The consequence was that by the time you men first
discovered the archipelago no fewer than forty kinds of plants had so
far diverged from the parent forms in Europe or elsewhere that your
savants considered them at once as distinct species, and set them down

at first as indigenous creations. It amused me immensely.
For out of these forty plants thirty-four were to my certain knowledge
of European origin. I had seen their seeds brought over by the wind or
waves, and I had watched them gradually altering under stress of the
new conditions into fresh varieties, which in process of time became
distinct species. Two of the oldest were flowers of the dandelion and
daisy group, provided with feathery seeds which enable them to fly far
before the carrying breeze; and these two underwent such profound
modifications in their insular home that the systematic botanists who at
last examined them insisted upon putting each into a new genus, all by
itself, invented for the special purpose of their reception. One almost
equally ancient inhabitant, a sort of harebell, also became in process of
time extremely unlike any other harebell I had ever seen in any part of
my airy wanderings. But the remaining thirty new species or so evolved
in the islands by the special circumstances of the group had varied so
comparatively little from their primitive European ancestors, that they
hardly deserved to be called anything more than very distinct and
divergent varieties.
Some five or six plants, however, I noted arrive in my archipelago, not
from Europe, but from the Canaries or Madeira, whose distant blue
peaks lay dim on the horizon far to the south-west of us, as I poised in
mid-air high above the topmost pinnacle of my wild craggy Pico. These
kinds, belonging to a much warmer region, soon, as I noticed,
underwent considerable modification in our cooler climate, and were
all of them adjudged distinct species by the learned gentlemen who
finally reported upon my island realm to British science.
As far as I can recollect, then, the total number of flowering plants I
noted in the islands before the arrival of man was about 200; and of
these, as I said before, only forty had so far altered in type as to be
considered at present peculiar to the archipelago. The remainder were
either comparatively recent arrivals or else had found the conditions of
their new home so like those of the old one from which they migrated,
that comparatively little change took place in their forms or habits. Of
course, just in proportion as the islands got stocked I noticed that the

changes were less and less marked; for each new plant, insect, or bird
that established itself successfully tended to make the balance of nature
more similar to the one that obtained in the mainland opposite, and so
decreased the chances of novelty of variation.
Hence, it struck me that the oldest arrivals were the ones which altered
most in adaptation to the circumstances, while the newest, finding
themselves in comparatively familiar surroundings, had less occasion
to be selected for strange and curious freaks or sports of form or colour.
The peopling of the islands with birds and animals, however, was to me
even a more interesting and engrossing study in natural evolution than
its peopling by plants, shrubs, and trees. I may as well begin, therefore,
by telling you at once that no furry or hairy quadruped of any sort--no
mammal, as I understand your men of science call them--was ever
stranded alive upon the shores of my islands. For twenty or thirty
centuries indeed, I waited patiently, examining every piece of
driftwood cast up upon our beaches, in the faint hope that perhaps some
tiny mouse or shrew or water-vole might lurk half drowned in some
cranny or crevice of the bark or trunk. But it was all in vain. I ought to
have known beforehand that terrestrial animals of the higher types
never by any chance reach an oceanic island in any part of this planet.
The only three specimens of mammals I ever saw tossed up on the
beach were two drowned mice and an unhappy squirrel, all as dead as
doornails, and horribly mauled by the sea and the breakers. Nor did we
ever get a snake, a lizard, a frog, or a fresh-water fish, whose eggs I at
first fondly supposed might occasionally be transported to us on bits of
floating trees or matted turf, torn by floods from those prehistoric
Lusitanian or African forests. No such luck was ours. Not a single
terrestrial vertebrate of any sort appeared upon our shores before the
advent