appearance, and I did not see one beautiful flower. The insects,
again, are small-sized and dull-coloured, and, as Mr. Waterhouse
informs me, there is nothing in their general appearance which would
have led him to imagine that they had come from under the equator. [1]
The birds, plants, and insects have a desert character, and are not
more brilliantly coloured than those from southern Patagonia; we may,
therefore, conclude that the usual gaudy colouring of the intertropical
productions, is not related either to the heat or light of those zones,
but to some other cause, perhaps to the conditions of existence being
generally favourable to life.
We will now turn to the order of reptiles, which gives the most
striking character to the zoology of these islands. The species are not
numerous, but the numbers of individuals of each species are
extraordinarily great. There is one small lizard belonging to a South
American genus, and two species (and probably more) of the
Amblyrhynchus--a genus confined to the Galapagos Islands. There is one
snake which is numerous; it is identical, as I am informed by M.
Bibron, with the Psammophis Temminckii from Chile. [2] Of sea-turtle I
believe there are more than one species, and of tortoises there are, as
we shall presently show, two or three species or races. Of toads and
frogs there are none: I was surprised at this, considering how well
suited for them the temperate and damp upper woods appeared to be. It
recalled to my mind the remark made by Bory St. Vincent, [3] namely,
that none of this family are found on any of the volcanic islands in
the great oceans. As far as I can ascertain from various works, this
seems to hold good throughout the Pacific, and even in the large
islands of the Sandwich archipelago. Mauritius offers an apparent
exception, where I saw the Rana Mascariensis in abundance: this frog is
said now to inhabit the Seychelles, Madagascar, and Bourbon; but on the
other hand, Du Bois, in his voyage in 1669, states that there were no
reptiles in Bourbon except tortoises; and the Officier du Roi asserts
that before 1768 it had been attempted, without success, to introduce
frogs into Mauritius--I presume for the purpose of eating: hence it may
be well doubted whether this frog is an aboriginal of these islands.
The absence of the frog family in the oceanic islands is the more
remarkable, when contrasted with the case of lizards, which swarm on
most of the smallest islands. May this difference not be caused, by
the greater facility with which the eggs of lizards, protected by
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