mains essentially volcanic in its composition, exactly as it was when
I first saw its youthful craters and its red-hot ash-cones pushed
gradually up, century after century, from the deep blue waters of the
Mid-Miocene ocean.

All round my islands the Atlantic then, as now, had a depth, as I said
before, of two thousand fathoms; indeed, in some parts between the
group and Portugal the plummet of your human navigators finds no
bottom, I have often heard them say, till it reaches 2,500; and out of
this profound sea-bed the volcanic energies pushed up my islands as a
small submarine mountain range, whose topmost summits alone stood out
bit by bit above the level of the surrounding sea. One of them, the
most abrupt and cone-like, by name now Pico, rises to this day, a
magnificent sight, sheer seven thousand feet into the sky from the
placid sheet that girds it round on every side. You creatures of
to-day, approaching it in one of your clumsy new-fashioned fire-driven
canoes that you call steamers, must admire immensely its conical peak,
as it stands out silhouetted against the glowing horizon in the deep
red glare of a sub-tropical Atlantic sunset.

But when I, from my solitary aerial perch, saw my islands rise bare and
massive first from the water's edge, the earliest idea that occurred to
me as an investigator of nature was simply this: how will they ever get
clad with soil and herbage and living creatures? So naked and barren
were their black crags and rocks of volcanic slag, that I could hardly
conceive how they could ever come to resemble the other smiling oceanic
islands which I looked down upon in my flight from day to day over so
many wide and scattered oceans. I set myself to watch, accordingly,
whence they would derive the first seeds of life, and what changes
would take place under dint of time upon their desolate surface.

For a long epoch, while the mountains were still rising in their active
volcanic state, I saw but little evidence of a marked sort of the
growth of living creatures upon their loose piles of pumice. Gradually,
however, I observed that spores of lichens, blown towards them by the
wind, were beginning to sprout upon the more settled rocks, and to
discolour the surface in places with grey and yellow patches. Bit by
bit, as rain fell upon the new-born hills, it brought down from their
weathered summits sand and mud, which the torrents ground small and
deposited in little hollows in the valleys; a