. For
natural selection, I found, is a hard schoolmaster. If you happen to
fit your place in the world, you live and thrive, but if you don't
happen to fit it, to the wall with you without quarter. Thus sometimes
I would see a small canary beetle quickly take to new food and new
modes of life on my islands under my very eyes, so that in a century or
so I judged him myself worthy of the distinction of a separate species;
while in another case, I remember, a south European weevil evolved
before long into something so wholly different from his former self
that a systematic entomologist would have been forced to enrol him in a
distinct genus. I often wish now that I had kept a regular collection
of all the intermediate forms, to present as an illustrative series to
one of your human museums; but in those days, of course, we none of us
imagined anybody but ourselves would ever take an interest in these
problems of the development of life, and we let the chance slide till
it was too late to recover it.

Naturally, during all these ages changes of other sorts were going on
in my islands--elevations and subsidences, separations and reunions,
which helped to modify the life of the group considerably. Indeed,
volcanic action was constantly at work altering the shapes and sizes of
the different rocky mountain-tops, and bringing now one, now another,
into closer relations than before with its neighbours. Why, as recently
as 1811 (a date which is so fresh in my memory that I could hardly
forget it) a new island was suddenly formed by submarine eruption off
the coast of St. Michael's, to which the name of Sabrina was
momentarily given by your human geographers. It was about a mile around
and 300 feet high; but, consisting as it did of loose cinders only, it
was soon washed away by the force of the waves in that stormy region. I
merely mention it here to show how recently volcanic changes have taken
place in my islands, and how continuously the internal energy has been
at work modifying and re-arranging them.

Up to the moment of the arrival of man in the archipelago the whole
population, animal and vegetable, consisted entirely of these waifs and
strays, blown out to sea from Europe or Africa, and modified more or
less on the spot in accordance with the varying needs of their new
home. But the advent of the obtrusive human species spoilt the game at
once for an independent observer. Man immediately introduced oranges,
bananas, swee