islands; but I could tell you some curious and interesting facts, too,
as to the mode of their arrival and the vicissitudes of their
settlement. For example, during the age of the Forest Beds in Europe, a
stray bullfinch was driven out to sea by a violent storm, and perched
at last on a bush at Fayal. I wondered at first whether he would effect
a settlement. But at that time no seeds or fruits fit for bullfinches
to eat existed on the islands. Still, as it turned out, this particular
bullfinch happened to have in his crop several undigested seeds of
European plants exactly suited to the bullfinch taste; so when he died
on the spot, these seeds, germinating abundantly, gave rise to a whole
valleyful of appropriate plants for bullfinches to feed upon. Now,
however, there was no bullfinch to eat them. For a long time, indeed,
no other bullfinches arrived at my archipelago. Once, to be sure, a few
hundred years later, a single cock bird did reach the island alone,
much exhausted with his journey, and managed to pick up a living for
himself off the seeds introduced by his unhappy predecessor. But as he
had no mate, he died at last, as 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