The Galapagos Islands

Abstract

It may be some comfort to botanists of the post-Hitler period to know that hooker’s paper “On the vegetation of the Galapagos Archipelago, as compared with that of some other tropical islands and of the continent of America”, in Trans. Linn. Soc. Lond. 20: 235–62 (1851) which was read to the Linnean Society on 1 and 15 December 1846, did not appear until five years later! It is based on a preceding paper by Hooker: “An enumeration of the plants of the Galapagos Archipelago; with descriptions of those which are new” read on 4 March, 6 May, and 16 December 1845 and printed in the Trans. Linn. Soc. 20: 163–234 (1851). This latter paper is a systematic list of the specimens collected in the Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin, James Macrae, and a few other naturalists. Darwin visited the islands during the voyage of H.M. Ship ’Beagle’ and devotes a chapter to them in his “Journal of Researches” (London, ed. 1, 1839; ed. 2, 1852; chapter XVII).