competitors among which they have been developed. Such birds as these may pass again and again to a new country, but are never able to establish themselves in it; and it is this organic barrier, as it is termed, rather than any physical barrier, which, in many cases, determines the presence of a species in one area and its absence from another. We must always remember, therefore, that, although the presence of a species in a remote oceanic island clearly proves that its ancestors must at one time have found their way there, the absence of a species does not prove the contrary, since it also may have reached the island, but have been unable to maintain itself, owing to the inorganic or organic conditions not being suitable to it. This general principle applies to all classes of organisms, and there are many striking illustrations of it. In the Azores there are eighteen species of land-birds which are permanent residents, but there are also several others which reach the islands almost every year after great storms, but have never been able to establish themselves. In Bermuda the facts are still more striking, since there are only ten species of resident birds, while no less than twenty other species of land-birds and more than a hundred species of waders and aquatics are frequent visitors, often in great numbers, but are never able to establish themselves. On the same principle we account for the fact that, of the many continental insects and birds that have been let loose, or have escaped from confinement, in this country, hardly one has been able to maintain itself, and the same phenomenon is still more striking in the case of plants. Of the thousands of hardy plants which grow easily in our gardens, very few have ever run wild, and when the experiment is purposely tried it invariably fails. Thus A. de Candolle informs us that several botanists of Paris, Geneva, and especially of Montpellier, have sown the seeds of many hundreds of species of exotic hardy plants, in what appeared to be the most favourable situations, but that in hardly a single case has any one of them become naturalised.[1] Still more, then, in plants than in animals the absence of a species does not prove that it has never reached the locality, but merely that it has not been able to maintain itself in com-
- ↑ Géographie Botanique, p. 798.
