_St. Helena._--A small volcanic island, ten miles long by eight wide, situated in mid-ocean, 1100 miles from Africa, and 1800 from South America. It is very mountainous and rugged, bounded for the most part by precipices, rising from ocean depths of 17,000 feet, to a height above the sea-level of nearly 3,000. When first discovered it was richly clothed with forests; but these were all destroyed by human agency during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The records of civilization present no more lamentable instance of this kind of destruction. From a merely pecuniary point of view the abolition of these primeval forests has proved an irreparable loss; but from a scientific point of view the loss is incalculable. These forests served to harbour countless forms of life, which extended at least from the Miocene age, and which, having found there an ocean refuge, survived as the last remnants of a remote geological epoch. In those days, as Mr. Wallace observes, St. Helena must have formed a kind of natural museum or vivarium of archaic species of all classes, the interest of which we can now only surmise from the few remnants of those remnants, which are still left among the more inaccessible portions of the mountain peaks and crater edges. These remnants of remnants are as follows. There is a total absence of all indigenous mammals, reptiles, fresh-water fish, and true land-birds. There is, however, a species of plover, allied to one in South Africa; but it is specifically distinct, and therefore peculiar to the island. The insect life, on the other hand, is abundant. Of beetles no less than 129 species are believed to be aboriginal, and, with one single exception, the whole number are peculiar to the island. "But in addition to this large amount of specific peculiarity (perhaps unequalled anywhere else in the world), the beetles of this island are remarkable for their generic isolation, and for the altogether exceptional proportion in which the great divisions of the order are represented. The species belong to 39 genera, of which no less than 25 are peculiar to the island; and many of these are such isolated forms that it is impossible to find their allies in any particular country[24]." More than two-thirds of all the species belong to the group of weevils--a circumstance which serves to explain the great wealth of beetle-population, the weevils being beetles which live in wood, and St. Helena having been originally a densely wooded island. This circumstance is also in accordance with the view that the peculiar insect fauna has been in large part evolved from ancestors which reached the island by means of floating timber; for, of course, no explanation can be suggested why special creation of this highly peculiar insect fauna should have run so disproportionately into the production of weevils. About two-thirds of the whole number of beetles, or over 80 species, show no close affinity with any existing insects,