in many parts of the group, so that the islands have now in effect a
wild mammalian fauna. What is more odd, a small lizard has also got
about in the walls--not as you would imagine, a native-born Portuguese
subject, but of a kind found only in Madeira and Teneriffe, and, as far
as I could make out at the time, it seemed to me to come over with
cuttings of Madeira vines for planting at St. Michael's. It was about
the same time, I imagine, that eels and gold-fish first got loose from
glass globes into the ponds and water-courses.

I have forgotten to mention, what you will no doubt yourself long since
have inferred, that my archipelago is known among human beings in
modern times as the Azores; and also that traces of all these curious
facts of introduction and modification, which I have detailed here in
their historical order, may still be detected by an acute observer and
reasoner in the existing condition of the fauna and flora. Indeed, one
of your own countrymen, Mr. Goodman, has collected all the most salient
of these facts in his 'Natural History of the Azores,' and another of
your distinguished men of science, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, has given
essentially the same explanations beforehand as those which I have here
ventured to lay, from another point of view, before a critical human
audience. But while Mr. Wallace has arrived at them by a process of
arguing backward from existing facts to prior causes and probable
antecedents, it occurred to me, who had enjoyed such exceptional
opportunities of watching the whole process unfold itself from the very
beginning, that a strictly historical account of how I had seen it come
about, step after step, might possess for some of you a greater direct
interest than Mr. Wallace's inferential solution of the self-same
problem. If, through lapse of memory or inattention to detail at so
remote a period, I have set down aught amiss, I sincerely trust you
will be kind enough to forgive me. But this little epic of the peopling