Principles of Geology / or, The Modern Changes of the Earth and its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology

by Sir Charles Lyell

Stations and habitations of plants.—As I shall frequently have occasion to speak of the stations and habitations of plants in the technical sense in which the terms are used in the above passage, I may remind the geologist that station indicates the peculiar nature of the locality where each species is accustomed to grow, and has reference to climate, soil, humidity, light, elevation above the sea, and other analogous circumstances; whereas, by habitation is meant a general indication of the country where a plant grows wild. Thus the station of a plant may be a salt-marsh, a hill-side, the bed of the sea, or a stagnant pool. Its habitation may be Europe, North America, or New Holland, between the tropics. The study of stations has been styled the topography, that of habitations the geography, of botany. The terms thus defined, express each a distinct class of ideas, which have been often confounded together, and which are equally applicable in zoology.

In farther illustration of the principle above alluded to, that difference of longitude, independently of any influence of temperature, is accompanied by a great, and sometimes a complete, diversity in the species of plants, De Candolle observes, that, out of 2891 species of phænogamous plants described by Pursh, in the United States, there are only 385 which are found in northern or temperate Europe. MM. Humboldt and Bonpland, in all their travels through equinoctial America, found only twenty-four species (these being all Cyperaceæ and Gramineæ) common to America and any part of the Old World. They collected, it is true, chiefly on the mountains, or the proportion would have been larger; for Dr. J. Hooker informs me that many tropical plants of the New World are identical with African species. Nevertheless, the general discordance of these Floras is very striking. On comparing New Holland with Europe, Mr. Brown ascertained that, out of 4100 species, discovered in Australia, there were only 166 common to Europe, and of this small number there were some few which may have been transported thither by man. Almost all of the 166 species were cryptogamic, and the rest consist, in nearly every case, of phænogamous plants which also inhabit intervening regions.

But what is still more remarkable, in the more widely separated parts of the ancient continent, notwithstanding the existence of an uninterrupted land-communication, the diversity in the specific character of the respective vegetations is almost as striking. Thus there is found one assemblage of species in China, another in the countries bordering the Black Sea and the Caspian, a third in those surrounding the Mediterranean, a fourth in the great platforms of Siberia and Tartary, and so forth.

The distinctness of the groups of indigenous plants, in the same parallel of latitude, is greatest where continents are disjoined by a wide expanse of ocean. In the northern hemisphere, near the pole, where the extremities of Europe, Asia, and America unite or approach near to one another, a considerable number of the same species of plants are found, common to the three continents. But it has been remarked, that these plants, which are thus so widely diffused in the arctic regions, are also found in the chain of the Aleutian islands, which stretch almost across from America to Asia, and which may probably have served as the channel of communication for the partial blending of the Floras of the adjoining regions. It has, indeed, been observed to be a general rule, that plants found at two points very remote from each other occur also in places intermediate.

Dr. J. Hooker informs me that in high latitudes in the southern ocean, in spite of the great extent of the sea, Floras of widely disconnected islands contain many species in common. Perhaps icebergs, transporting to vast distances not only stones, but soil with the seeds of plants, may explain this unusually wide diffusion of insular plants.

In islands very distant from continents the total number of plants is comparatively small; but a large proportion of the species are such as occur nowhere else. In so far as the Flora of such islands is not peculiar to them, it contains, in general, species common to the nearest main lands.[845] The islands of the great southern ocean exemplify these rules; the easternmost containing more American, and the western more Indian plants.[846] Madeira and Teneriffe contain many species, and even entire genera, peculiar to them; but they have also plants in common with Portugal, Spain, the Azores, and the north-west coast of Africa.[847]

In the Canaries, out of 533 species of phænogamous plants, it is said that 310 are peculiar to these islands, and the rest identical with those of the African continent; but in the Flora of St. Helena, which is so far distant even from the western shores of Africa, there have been found, out of thirty native species of the phænogamous class, only one or two which are to be found in any other part of the globe. On the other hand, of sixty cryptogamic plants, collected by Dr. J. Hooker in the same island, twelve only were peculiar.

The natural history of the Galapagos archipelago, described by Mr. Darwin, affords another very instructive illustration of the laws governing the geographical distribution of plants and animals in islands. This group consists of ten principal islands, situated in the Pacific Ocean, under the equator, about 600 miles westward of the coast of South America. As they are all formed of volcanic rocks, many of the craters, of which there are about 2000 in number, having a very fresh aspect, we may regard the whole as much more modern in origin than the mass of the adjoining continent; yet neither has the Flora nor Fauna been derived from South America, but consist of species for the most part indigenous, yet stamped with a character decidedly South American.

What is still more singular, there is a difference between the species inhabiting the different islands. Of flowering plants, for example, there are 185 species at present known, and forty cryptogamic, making together 225. One hundred of the former class are new species, probably confined to this archipelago; and of the rest, ten at least have been introduced by man. Of twenty-one species of Compositæ, all but one are peculiar, and they belong to twelve genera, no less than ten of which genera are confined to the Galapagos. Dr. Hooker observes, that the type of this Flora has an undoubted relation to that of the western side of South America, and he detects in it no affinity with that of the numerous islands scattered over other parts of the Pacific. So in regard to the birds, reptiles, land-shells, and insects, this archipelago, standing as it does in the Pacific Ocean, is zoologically part of America. Although each small island is not more than fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them are in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, rising nearly to an equal height, and placed under a similar climate, they are tenanted each by a different set of beings, the tortoises, mocking-thrushes, finches, beetles, scarcely any of them ever ranging over the whole, and often not even common to any two of the islands.

"The archipelago," says Mr. Darwin, "is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America; whence it has derived a few stray colonists, and has received the general character of its indigenous productions. One is astonished," he adds, "at the amount of creative force displayed on so many small, barren, and rocky islands, and still more so, at its diverse, yet analogous action on points so near each other. I have said that the Galapagos archipelago might be called a satellite attached to America, but it should rather be called a group of satellites physically similar, organically distinct, yet intimately related to each other, and all related in a marked, though much lesser degree, to the great American continent."[848]