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Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882

"The Voyage of the Beagle"

Too much confidence, however, must not be
placed in the proportional results, as the small collections
brought home by some other naturalists though in some respects
confirming the results, plainly show that much remains to be done
in the botany of this group: the Leguminosae, moreover, have as yet
been only approximately worked out:--
Hence we have the truly wonderful fact, that in James Island, of
the thirty-eight Galapageian plants, or those found in no other
part of the world, thirty are exclusively confined to this one
island; and in Albemarle Island, of the twenty-six aboriginal
Galapageian plants, twenty-two are confined to this one island,
that is, only four are at present known to grow in the other
islands of the archipelago; and so on, as shown in the above table,
with the plants from Chatham and Charles Islands. This fact will,
perhaps, be rendered even more striking, by giving a few
illustrations:--thus, Scalesia, a remarkable arborescent genus of
the Compositae, is confined to the archipelago: it has six species:
one from Chatham, one from Albemarle, one from Charles Island, two
from James Island, and the sixth from one of the three latter
islands, but it is not known from which: not one of these six
species grows on any two islands.


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