Science in Arcady | Page 8

shapes and sizes of
the different rocky mountain-tops, and bringing now one, now another,
into closer relations than before with its neighbours. Why, as recently
as 1811 (a date which is so fresh in my memory that I could hardly
forget it) a new island was suddenly formed by submarine eruption off
the coast of St. Michael's, to which the name of Sabrina was
momentarily given by your human geographers. It was about a mile
around and 300 feet high; but, consisting as it did of loose cinders only,
it was soon washed away by the force of the waves in that stormy
region. I merely mention it here to show how recently volcanic changes
have taken place in my islands, and how continuously the internal
energy has been at work modifying and re-arranging them.
Up to the moment of the arrival of man in the archipelago the whole

population, animal and vegetable, consisted entirely of these waifs and
strays, blown out to sea from Europe or Africa, and modified more or
less on the spot in accordance with the varying needs of their new home.
But the advent of the obtrusive human species spoilt the game at once
for an independent observer. Man immediately introduced oranges,
bananas, sweet potatoes, grapes, plums, almonds, and many other trees
or shrubs, in which, for selfish reasons, he was personally interested. At
the same time he quite unconsciously and unintentionally stocked the
islands with a fine vigorous crop of European weeds, so that the
number of kinds of flowering plants included in the modern flora of my
little archipelago exceeds, I think, by fully one-half that which I
remember before the date of the Portuguese occupation. In the same
way, besides his domestic animals, this spoil-sport colonist man
brought in his train accidentally rabbits, weasels, mice, and rats, which
now abound in many parts of the group, so that the islands have now in
effect a wild mammalian fauna. What is more odd, a small lizard has
also got about in the walls--not as you would imagine, a native-born
Portuguese subject, but of a kind found only in Madeira and Teneriffe,
and, as far as I could make out at the time, it seemed to me to come
over with cuttings of Madeira vines for planting at St. Michael's. It was
about the same time, I imagine, that eels and gold-fish first got loose
from glass globes into the ponds and water-courses.
I have forgotten to mention, what you will no doubt yourself long since
have inferred, that my archipelago is known among human beings in
modern times as the Azores; and also that traces of all these curious
facts of introduction and modification, which I have detailed here in
their historical order, may still be detected by an acute observer and
reasoner in the existing condition of the fauna and flora. Indeed, one of
your own countrymen, Mr. Goodman, has collected all the most salient
of these facts in his 'Natural History of the Azores,' and another of your
distinguished men of science, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, has given
essentially the same explanations beforehand as those which I have
here ventured to lay, from another point of view, before a critical
human audience. But while Mr. Wallace has arrived at them by a
process of arguing backward from existing facts to prior causes and
probable antecedents, it occurred to me, who had enjoyed such

exceptional opportunities of watching the whole process unfold itself
from the very beginning, that a strictly historical account of how I had
seen it come about, step after step, might possess for some of you a
greater direct interest than Mr. Wallace's inferential solution of the
self-same problem. If, through lapse of memory or inattention to detail
at so remote a period, I have set down aught amiss, I sincerely trust you
will be kind enough to forgive me. But this little epic of the peopling of
a single oceanic archipelago by casual strays, which I alone have had
the good fortune to follow through all its episodes, seemed to me too
unique and valuable a chapter in the annals of life to be withheld
entirely from the scientific world of your eager, ephemeral, nineteenth
century humanity.

TROPICAL EDUCATION.
If any one were to ask me (which is highly unlikely) 'In what university
would an intelligent young man do best to study?' I think I should be
very much inclined indeed to answer offhand, 'In the Tropics.'
No doubt this advice sounds on first hearing just a trifle paradoxical;
and no doubt, too, the proposed university has certain serious
drawbacks (like many others) on the various grounds of health, expense,
faith, and morals. Senior Proctors are unknown at Honolulu; Select
Preachers don't range as far as the West Coast.