an ancestors. The consequence was that by the time you men
first discovered the archipelago no fewer than forty kinds of plants
had so far diverged from the parent forms in Europe or elsewhere that
your savants considered them at once as distinct species, and set them
down at first as indigenous creations. It amused me immensely.

For out of these forty plants thirty-four were to my certain knowledge
of European origin. I had seen their seeds brought over by the wind or
waves, and I had watched them gradually altering under stress of the
new conditions into fresh varieties, which in process of time became
distinct species. Two of the oldest were flowers of the dandelion and
daisy group, provided with feathery seeds which enable them to fly far
before the carrying breeze; and these two underwent such profound
modifications in their insular home that the systematic botanists who
at last examined them insisted upon putting each into a new genus, all
by itself, invented for the special purpose of their reception. One
almost equally ancient inhabitant, a sort of harebell, also became in
process of time extremely unlike any other harebell I had ever seen in
any part of my airy wanderings. But the remaining thirty new species or
so evolved in the islands by the special circumstances of the group had
varied so comparatively little from their primitive European ancestors,
that they hardly deserved to be called anything more than very distinct
and divergent varieties.

Some five or six plants, however, I noted arrive in my archipelago, not
from Europe, but from the Canaries or Madeira, whose distant blue peaks
lay dim on the horizon far to the south-west of us, as I poised in
mid-air high above the topmost pinnacle of my wild craggy Pico. These
kinds, belonging to a much warmer region, soon, as I noticed, underwent
considerable modification in our cooler climate, and were all of them
adjudged distinct species by the learned gentlemen who finally reported
upon my island realm to British science.

As far as I can recollect, then, the total number of flowering plants I
noted in the islands before the arrival of man was about 200; and of
these, as I said before, only forty had so far altered in type as to be
considered at present peculiar to the archipelago. The remainder were
either comparatively recent arrivals or else had found the conditions
of their new home so like those of the old one from which they
migrated, that comparati