sowed both lettuces, carrots, and other garden plants, and set in the
woods a great variety of plum, apricot, and peach stones. And these last,
he has been informed, have since thriven to a very remarkable degree; for
some gentlemen, who in their passage from Lima to old Spain were taken
and brought to England, having procured leave to wait upon Mr. Anson to
thank him for his generosity and humanity to his prisoners, some of whom
were their relations, they in casual discourse with him about his
transactions in the South Seas, particularly asked him if he had not
planted a great number of fruit-stones on the island of Juan Fernandez;
for they told him their late navigators had discovered there numbers of
peach trees and apricot trees, which being fruits before unobserved in
that place, they concluded them to be produced from kernels set by him.

ALEXANDER SELKIRK.

Former writers have related that this island abounded with vast numbers
of goats; and their accounts are not to be questioned, this place being
the usual haunt of the buccaneers* and privateers who formerly frequented
those seas. And there are two instances--one of a Mosquito Indian, and
the other of Alexander Selkirk, a Scotchman, who were left by their
respective ships, and lived alone upon this island for some years, and
consequently were no strangers to its produce. Selkirk, who was the last,
after a stay of between four and five years, was taken off the place by
the Duke and Duchess privateers, of Bristol, as may be seen at large in
the journal of their voyage. His manner of life during his solitude was
in most particulars very remarkable; but there is one circumstance he
relates which was so strangely verified by our own observation that I
cannot help reciting it. He tells us, among other things, as he often
caught more goats than he wanted, he sometimes marked their ears and let
them go. This was about thirty-two years before our arrival at the