I Give
All The Following Results On The High Authority Of My Friend
Dr. J. Hooker.
I may premise that I indiscriminately collected
everything in flower on the different islands, and fortunately
kept my collections separate.
Too much confidence,
however, must not be placed in the proportional results, as
the small collections brought home by some other naturalists
though in some respects confirming the results, plainly show
that much remains to be done in the botany of this group:
the Leguminosae, moreover, has as yet been only approximately
worked out: -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Number of
Species
confined
to the
Number of Number of Galapagos
species species Number Archipelago
Total found in confined confined but found
Name Number other to the to the on more
of of parts of Galapagos one than the
Island Species the world Archipelago island one island
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
James 71 33 38 30 8
Albemarle 4 18 26 22 4
Chatham 32 16 16 12 4
Charles 68 39 29 21 8
(or 29, if
the probably
imported
plants be
subtracted.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hence we have the truly wonderful fact, that in James
Island, of the thirty-eight Galapageian plants, or those found
in no other part of the world, thirty are exclusively confined
to this one island; and in Albemarle Island, of the twenty-
six aboriginal Galapageian plants, twenty-two are confined
to this one island, that is, only four are at present known to
grow in the other islands of the archipelago; and so on, as
shown in the above table, with the plants from Chatham and
Charles Islands. This fact will, perhaps, be rendered even
more striking, by giving a few illustrations: - thus, Scalesia,
a remarkable arborescent genus of the Compositae, is confined
to the archipelago: it has six species: one from Chatham,
one from Albemarle, one from Charles Island, two from
James Island, and the sixth from one of the three latter
islands, but it is not known from which: not one of these six
species grows on any two islands. Again, Euphorbia, a mundane
or widely distributed genus, has here eight species, of
which seven are confined to the archipelago, and not one
found on any two islands: Acalypha and Borreria, both mundane
genera, have respectively six and seven species, none
of which have the same species on two islands, with the
exception of one Borreria, which does occur on two islands.
The species of the Compositae are particularly local; and Dr.
Hooker has furnished me with several other most striking
illustrations of the difference of the species on the different
islands. He remarks that this law of distribution holds good
both with those genera confined to the archipelago, and those
distributed in other quarters of the world: in like manner
we have seen that the different islands have their proper
species of the mundane genus of tortoise, and of the widely
distributed American genus of the mocking-thrush, as well
as of two of the Galapageian sub-groups of finches, and
almost certainly of the Galapageian genus Amblyrhynchus.
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