At the Galapagos, the tortoises going to any place travel night and day and so get there sooner than would be expected,—about eight miles in two or three days. He rode on their backs.
The productions of the Galapagos Archipelago, from five to six hundred miles from America, are still of the American type. “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 the hot, dry deserts of Northern Chile, vividly brought before my eyes.” What is most singular, not only are the plants, etc., to a great extent peculiar to these islands, but each for the most part has its own kinds, though they are within sight of each other.
Birds so tame that they can be killed with a stick. I would suggest that, from having dealt so long with the inoffensive and slow-moulded tortoise, they have not yet acquired an instinctive fear of man, who is a new-comer. Methinks tortoises, lizards, etc., for wild creatures are remarkable for the nearness to which man approaches them and handles them, as logs,—cold-blooded, lumpish forms of life,—only taking care not to step into their mouths. An alligator has been known to have come out of the mud like a mud volcano where was now the floor of a native’s hut.
“The common dock is ... widely disseminated, [in New Zealand][211] and will, I fear, forever remain a proof of the rascality of an Englishman, who sold the seeds for those of the tobacco plant.”
The New-Hollanders a little higher in the scale of civilization than the Fuegians.
Puzzled by a “well rounded fragment of greenstone, rather larger than a man’s head,” which a captain had found on a small coral circle or atoll near Keeling Island, “where every other particle of matter is calcareous,” about six hundred miles from Sumatra. D. agrees with Kotzebue (vide Kotzebue) who states that (Darwin’s words) “the inhabitants of the Radack Archipelago, a group of lagoon-islands in the midst of the Pacific, obtained stones for sharpening their instruments by searching the roots of trees which are cast upon the beach,” and “laws have been established that such stones belong to the chief, and a punishment is inflicted on any one who attempts to steal them.” Let geologists look out. “Some natives carried by Kotzebue to Kamtschatka collected stones to take back to their country.”
Found no bottom at 7200 feet, and 2200 yards from shore of Keeling Island, a coral isle.
His theory of the formation of coral isles by the subsidence of the land appears probable. He concludes that “the great continents are, for the most part, rising areas; and ... the central parts of the great oceans are sinking areas.”
Not a private person on the island of Ascension; the inhabitants are paid and victualled by the British government. Springs, cisterns, etc., are managed by the same. “Indeed, the whole island may be compared to a huge ship kept in first-rate order.”
Vide “Circumnavigation of Globe up to Cook.”