The Proportion Of 100 Flowering Plants Out Of 183
(Or 175 Excluding The Imported Weeds) Being New, Is Sufficient,
I
Conceive, to make the Galapagos Archipelago a distinct
botanical province; but this Flora is not nearly so
peculiar as that
Of St. Helena, nor, as I am informed by
Dr. Hooker, of Juan Fernandez. The peculiarity of the
Galapageian Flora is best shown in certain families; - thus
there are 21 species of Compositae, of which 20 are peculiar
to this archipelago; these belong to twelve genera, and of
these genera no less than ten are confined to the archipelago!
Dr. Hooker informs me that the Flora has an undoubtedly
Western American character; nor can he detect in it any
affinity with that of the Pacific. If, therefore, we except the
eighteen marine, the one fresh-water, and one land-shell,
which have apparently come here as colonists from the
central islands of the Pacific, and likewise the one distinct
Pacific species of the Galapageian group of finches, we see
that this archipelago, though standing in the Pacific Ocean,
is zoologically part of America.
If this character were owing merely to immigrants from
America, there would be little remarkable in it; but we see
that a vast majority of all the land animals, and that more
than half of the flowering plants, are aboriginal productions
It was most striking to be surrounded by new birds, new
reptiles, new shells, new insects, new plants, and yet by
innumerable trifling details of structure, and even by the tones
of voice and plumage of the birds, to have the temperate plains
of Patagonia, or rather the hot dry deserts of Northern Chile,
vividly brought before my eyes.
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