Origin of Species Variorum

in the Galapagos Islands reptiles, and in New Zealand gigantic wingless birds, take, or recently took, the place of mammals. Although New Zealand is here spoken of as an oceanic island, it is in some degree doubtful whether it should be so ranked; it is of large size, and is not separated from Australia by a profoundly deep sea; from its geological character and the direction of its mountain-ranges, the Rev. W. B. Clarke has lately maintained that this island, as well as New Caledonia, should be considered as appurtenances of Australia. Turning to plants, Dr. Hooker has shown that in the Galapagos Islands the proportional numbers of the different orders are very different from what they are elsewhere. All such differences in number, and the absence of certain whole groups of animals and plants on islands, are generally accounted for by supposed differences in their physical conditions; ... but this explanation is not a little doubtful. Facility of immigration seems to have been fully as important as the nature of the conditions.

Many remarkable little facts could be given with respect to the inhabitants of oceanic islands. For instance, in certain islands not tenanted by a single mammal, some of the endemic plants have beautifully hooked seeds; and few relations are more manifest than that hooked seeds are adapted for transportal in the wool or fur of quadrupeds. But a hooked seed might be carried to an island by .. other means; and the plant then becoming .. modified ... would form an endemic species, which might still retain the hooks, which would not form a more useless appendage than the shrivelled wings under the soldered elytra of many insular beetles. Again, islands often possess trees or bushes belonging to orders .. elsewhere including only herbaceous species; now trees, as Alph. de Candolle has shown, generally have,