CREATION BY EVOLUTION
continents and continental islands—the sandstones, limestones, shales and slates, and the coarsely crystalline rocks, such as granite—are not found on the oceanic islands, whose history was radically different from that of the continents and their islands.
When we turn to the animals and plants that inhabit these remote islands we immediately note their marked difference from those of the continental islands. Oceanic islands have no land mammals other than bats, which are carried for great distances by storms, just as land birds are. On some of these islands mice are found, but these may have been introduced by men. Amphibians (that is, frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, and the like) are lacking, because not only are these animals unable to endure sea water, but sea water is fatal also to their eggs. Such islands have no true fresh-water fishes, crustaceans, or mussels. The fresh-water fishes and mussels that they do contain are those which readily enter streams from the ocean and so are much the same everywhere. The animals that are found in these remote islands are land birds, lizards, snails, and insects—such creatures, in short, as may reach them more or less accidentally, as it were, being carried by wind or floated on driftwood for long distances by ocean currents. Their plants also are of the kinds whose seeds are carried by wind and wave.
These oceanic islands may have received their plants and animals in one of two ways. The doctrine of special creation maintains that these plants and animals were directly created where we now find them. If we hold that they were specially created on each island we should expect to find on each island such forms as were particularly adapted to live on it, to which, in short, the environment was suitable and favourable. But this is not at all the case. Many of these oceanic islands are large and could support rather large ani-
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