Page - 435 - in The Origin of Species

ABSENCE OF BATRACHIANS 435 doubtful. Facility of immigration seems to have been fully as important as the nature of the conditions. Many remarkable little facts could be given with respect to the inhabitants of oceanic islands. For instance, in cer- tain islands not tenanted by a single mammal, some of the endemic plants have beautifully hooked seeds; yet few rela- tions are more manifest than that hooks serve for the trans- portal of seeds in the wool or fur of quadrupeds. But a hooked seed might be carried to an island by other means; and the plant then becoming modified would form an endemic species, still retaining its hooks, which would form a useless appendage like the shrivelled wings under the soldered wing- covers of many insular beetles. Again, islands often possess trees or bushes belonging to orders which elsewhere include only herbaceous species ; now trees, as Alph. de Candolle has shown, generally have, whatever the cause may be, con- fined ranges. Hence trees would be little likely to reach dis- tant oceanic islands ; and an herbaceous plant, which had no chance of successfully competing with the many fully devel- oped trees growing on a continent, might, when established on an island, gain an advantage over other herbaceous plants by growing taller and taller and overtopping them. In this case, natural selection would tend to add to the stature of the plant, to whatever order it belonged, and thus first convert it into a bush and then into a tree. ABSENCE OF BATRACHIANS AND TERRESTRIAL MAMMALS ON OCEANIC ISLANDS. With respect to the absence of whole orders of animals on oceanic islands, Bory St. Vincent long ago remarked that Batrachians (frogs, toads, newts) are never found on any of the many islands with which the great oceans are studded. I have taken pains to verify this assertion, and have found it true, with the exception of New Zealand, New Caledonia, the Andaman Islands, and perhaps the Salomon Islands and the Seychelles. But I have already remarked that it is doubtful whether New Zealand and New Caledonia ought to be classed as oceanic islands; and this is still more doubtful with respect to the Andaman and Salomon groups and the