your lawyers would say, without issue.

It was a couple of hundred years or so more before I saw a third
bullfinch--which didn't surprise me, for bullfinches are very woodland
birds, and non-migratory into the bargain--so that they didn't often
get blown seaward over the broad Atlantic. At the end of that time,
however, I observed one morning a pair of finches, after a heavy storm,
drying their poor battered wings upon a shrub in one of the islands.
From this solitary pair a new race sprang up, which developed after a
time, as I imagined they must, into a distinct species. These local
bullfinches now form the only birds peculiar to the islands; and the
reason is one well divined by one of your own great naturalists (to
whom I mean before I end to make the _amende honorable_). In almost all
other cases the birds kept getting reinforced from time to time by
others of their kind blown out to sea accidentally--for only such
species were likely to arrive there--and this kept up the purity of the
original race, by ensuring a cross every now and again with the
European community. But the bullfinches, being the merest casuals,
never again to my knowledge were reinforced from the mainland, and so
they have produced at last a special island type, exactly adapted to
the peculiarities of their new habitat.

You see, there was hardly ever a big storm on land that didn't bring at
least one or two new birds of some sort or other to the islands.
Naturally, too, the newcomers landed always on the first shore they
could sight; and so at the present day the greatest number of species
is found on the two easternmost islands nearest the mainland, which
have forty kinds of land-birds, while the central islands have but
thirty-six, and the western only twenty-nine. It would have been quite
different, of course, if the birds came mainly from America with the
trade winds and the Gulf Stream, as I at first anticipated. In that
case, there would have been most kinds in the westernmost islands, and
fewest stragglers in the far eastern. But your own naturalists have
rightly seen that the existing distribution necessarily implies the
opposite explanation.

Birds, I early noticed, are always great carriers of fruit-seeds,
because they eat the berries, but don't digest the hard little stones
within. It was in that way, I fancy, that the Portugal laurel first
came to my islands, because it has an edible fruit with a very hard
seed; and the same reas