They support no inhabitants—mainly because they have little water—and they are sufficiently distant from the ordinary trade routes (at least until the opening of the Panama Canal) to have remained comparatively unvisited. Their flora and fauna have followed their own lines of evolution without interference from the mainland, so that they boast their own special species of insects and reptiles and cacti. The monstrous Galapagos tortoises gave the Archipelago its collective name, but the individual islands were christened by the Englishmen who called there on sundry occasions; Albemarle, Indefatigable, Chatham, Barrington, Resolution and the rest are all reminiscent of ships or admirals or statesmen. Hither came Woodes, Rogers and Dampier, privateering, and Anson with King George’s commission. The Pacific whalers—Herman Melville among them—called to stock their ships with tortoises. HMS Beagle came here a hundred years ago with a young naturalist of an inquiring turn of mind on board, by name Charles Darwin, who was so struck by the evidence of evolution among the living creatures there that his thoughts were directed to the consideration of the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.
