In the comparatively limited--but in itself extensive--class of facts thus presented, we have a particularly fair and cogent test as between the alternative theories of evolution and creation. For where we meet with a volcanic island, hundreds of miles from any other land, and rising abruptly from an ocean of enormous depth, we may be quite sure that such an island can never have formed part of a now submerged continent. In other words, we may be quite sure that it always has been what it now is--an oceanic peak, separated from all other land by hundreds of miles of sea, and therefore an area supplied by nature for the purpose, as it were, of testing the rival theories of creation and evolution. For, let us ask, upon these tiny insular specks of land what kind of life should we expect to find? To this question the theories of special creation and of gradual evolution would agree in giving the same answer up to a certain point. For both theories would agree in supposing that these islands would, at all events in large part, derive their inhabitants from accidental or occasional arrivals of wind-blown or water-floated organisms from other countries--especially, of course, from the countries least remote. But, after agreeing upon this point, the two theories must part company in their anticipations. The special-creation theory can have no reason to suppose that a small volcanic island in the midst of a great ocean should be chosen as the theatre of any extraordinary creative activity, or for any particularly rich manufacture of peculiar species to be found nowhere else in the world. On the other hand, the evolution theory would expect to find that such habitats are stocked with more or less peculiar species. For it would expect that when any organisms chanced to reach a wholly isolated refuge of this kind, their descendants should forthwith have started upon an independent course of evolutionary history. Protected from intercrossing with any members of their parent species elsewhere, and exposed to considerable changes in their conditions of life, it would indeed be fatal to the general theory of evolution if these descendants, during the course of many generations, were not to undergo appreciable change. It has happened on two or three occasions that European rats have been accidentally imported by ships upon some of these islands, and even already it is observed that their descendants have undergone a slight change of appearance, so as to constitute them what naturalists call local varieties. The change, of course, is but slight, because the time allowed for it has been so short. But the longer the time that a colony of a species is thus completely isolated under changed conditions of life the greater, according to the evolution theory, should we expect the change to become. Therefore, in all cases where we happen to know, from independent evidence of a geological kind, that an oceanic island