st
and present inhabitants of the world should appear in a certain order and
in certain areas; that He has impressed on them the most extraordinary
resemblances, and has classed them in groups subordinate to groups. But by
such statements we gain no new knowledge; we do not connect together facts
and laws; we explain nothing.

In a third work I shall try the principle of natural selection by seeing
how far it will give a fair explanation of the several classes of facts
just alluded to. It was the consideration of these facts which first led me
to take up the present subject. When I visited, during the voyage of H.M.S.
_Beagle_, the Galapagos Archipelago, situated in the Pacific Ocean about
500 miles from the shore of South America, I found myself surrounded by
peculiar species of birds, reptiles, and plants, existing nowhere else in
the world. Yet they nearly all bore an American stamp. In the song of the
mocking-thrush, in the harsh cry of the carrion-hawk, in the great
candlestick-like opuntias, I clearly perceived the neighbourhood of
America, though the islands were separated by so many miles of ocean from
the mainland, and differed much from it in their geological {10}
constitution and climate. Still more surprising was the fact that most of
the inhabitants of each separate island in this small archipelago were
specifically different, though most closely related to each other. The
archipelago, with its innumerable craters and bare streams of lava,
appeared to be of recent origin; and thus I fancied myself brought near to
the very act of creation. I often asked myself how these many peculiar
animals and plants had been produced: the simplest answer seemed to be that
the inhabitants of the several islands had descended from each other,
undergoing modification in the course of their descent; and that all the
inhabitants of the archipelago had descended from those of the nearest
land, namely America, whence colonists would naturally have been derived.
But it long remained to me an inexplicable problem how the necessary degree
of modification could have been effected, and it would have thus remained
for ever, had I not studied domestic productions, and thus acquired a just
idea of the power of Selection. As soon as I had fully realized this idea,
I saw, on reading Malthus on Population, that Natural Selection was the
inevitable result of the rapid increase of all organic beings; for I was
prepared to appreciate the strug