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 comparatively little change took place in their forms or
habits. Of course, just in proportion as the islands got stocked I
noticed that the changes were less and less marked; for each new plant,
insect, or bird that established itself successfully tended to make the
balance of nature more similar to the one that obtained in the mainland
opposite, and so decreased the chances of novelty of variation.

Hence, it struck me that the oldest arrivals were the ones which
altered most in adaptation to the circumstances, while the newest,