If this character were owing merely to immigrants from America, there
would be little remarkable in it; but we see that a vast majority of
all the land animals, and that more than half of the flowering plants,
are aboriginal productions. It was most striking to be surrounded by new
birds, new reptiles, new shells, new insects, new plants, and yet by
innumerable trifling details of structure, and even by the tones of
voice and plumage of the birds, to have the temperate plains of
Patagonia, or rather the hot dry deserts of Northern Chile, vividly
brought before my eyes. Why, on these small points of land, which
within a late geological period must have been covered by the ocean,
which are formed by basaltic lava, and therefore differ in geological
character from the American continent, and which are placed under a
peculiar climate,--why were their aboriginal inhabitants, associated, I
may add, in different proportions both in kind and number from those on
the continent, and therefore acting on each other in a different
manner--why were they created on American types of organization? It is
probable that the islands of the Cape de Verd group resemble, in all
their physical conditions, far more closely the Galapagos Islands, than
these latter physically resemble the coast of America, yet the
aboriginal inhabitants of the two groups are totally unlike; those of
the Cape de Verd Islands bearing the impress of Africa, as the
inhabitants of the Galapagos Archipelago are stamped with that of
America.
I have not as yet noticed by far the most remarkable feature in the
natural history of this archipelago; it is, that the different islands
to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings. My
attention was first called to this fact by the Vice-Governor, Mr.
Lawson, declaring that the tortoises differed from the different
islands, and that he could with certainty tell from which island any
one was brought. I did not for some time pay sufficient attention to
this statement, and I had already partially mingled together the
collections from two of the islands. I never dreamed that islands,
about 50 or 60 miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other,
formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar
climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently
tenanted; but we shall soon see that this is the case. It is the fate
of most voyagers, no sooner to discover what is most interesting in any
locality, than they are hurried from it; but I ought, perhaps, to be
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