es of antecedent epochs, in each of
which the earth has been successively peopled by distinct species of
animals and plants.

In an early stage of society the necessity of hunting acts as a
principle of repulsion, causing men to spread with the greatest rapidity
over a country, until the whole is covered with scattered settlements.
It has been calculated that eight hundred acres of hunting-ground
produce only as much food as half an acre of arable land. When the game
has been in a great measure exhausted, and a state of pasturage
succeeds, the several hunter tribes, being already scattered, may
multiply in a short time into the greatest number which the pastoral
state is capable of sustaining. The necessity, says Brand, thus imposed
upon the two savage states, of dispersing themselves far and wide over
the country, affords a reason why, at a very early period, the worst
parts of the earth may have become inhabited.

But this reason, it may be said, is only applicable in as far as regards
the peopling of a continuous continent; whereas the smallest islands,
however remote from continents, have almost always been found inhabited
by man. St. Helena, it is true, afforded an exception; for when that
island was discovered in 1501, it was only inhabited by sea-fowl, and
occasionally by seals and turtles, and was covered with a forest of
trees and shrubs, all of species peculiar to it, with one or two
exceptions, and which seem to have been expressly created for this
remote and insulated spot.[941]

The islands also of Mauritius, Bourbon, Pitcairns, and Juan Fernandez,
and those of the Galapagos archipelago, one of which is seventy miles
long, were inhabited when first discovered, and, what is more remarkable
than all, the Falkland Islands, which together are 120 miles in length
by 60 in breadth, and abounding in food fit for the support of man.

_Drifting of canoes to vast distances._--But very few of the numerous
coral islets and volcanoes of the vast Pacific, capable of sustaining a
few families of men, have been found untenanted; and we have, therefore,
to inquire whence and by what means, if all the members of the great
human family have had one common source, could those savages have
migrated. Cook, Forster, and others, have remarked that parties of
savages in their canoes must have often lost their way, and must have
been driven on distant shores, where they were forced to remain,
deprived both of the means and of th