Galapagos Travel Blog

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 the hot dry deserts
of Northern Chile, vividly brought before my eyes. Why, on these
small points of land, which within a late geological period must
have been covered by the ocean, which are formed of basaltic lava,
and therefore differ in geological character from the American
continent, and which are placed under a peculiar climate,--why were
their aboriginal inhabitants, associated, I may add, in different
proportions both in kind and number from those on the continent,
and therefore acting on each other in a different manner--why were
they created on American types of organisation? It is probable that
the islands of the Cape de Verd group resemble, in all their
physical conditions, far more closely the Galapagos Islands than
these latter physically resemble the coast of America, yet the
aboriginal inhabitants of the two groups are totally unlike; those
of the Cape de Verd Islands bearing the impress of Africa, as the
inhabitants of the Galapagos Archipelago are stamped with that of
America.