Other oceanic islands present great varieties of conditions, but leading to similar conclusions. Some, as the Bermudas, seem to have been settled in very modern times with animals and plants nearly all identical with those of neighbouring countries, though even here it would appear that there are some indigenous species which would indicate a greater age or more extended lands, now submerged.[186] Others, like St. Helena, are occupied apparently with old settlers, which may have come to them in early Tertiary, or even in Secondary periods, which have long since become extinct on the continents, and whose nearest analogues are now widely scattered over the world. Islands are therefore places of survival of old species--special preserves for forms of life lost to the continents. One of the most curious of these is Celebes, which seems to be a surviving fragment of Miocene Asia, which, though so near to that continent, has been sufficiently isolated to preserve its old population during all the vast lapse of time between the middle Tertiary and the present period. This is a fact which gives to the oceanic islands the greatest geological interest, and induces us to look into their actual fauna and flora for the representatives of species known on the mainland only as fossils. It is thus that we look to the marsupials of Australia as the nearest analogues of those of the Jurassic of Europe, and that we find in the strange Barramunda (_ceratodus_) of its rivers the only survivor of a group of fishes once widely distributed, but which has long since perished elsewhere. [186] Heilprin mentions eleven marine mollusks supposed to be peculiar to the islands, and eight species of land shells, as well as a few Crustaceans hitherto found only in the Pacific. The comparisons are, however, admitted to be incomplete. Perhaps one of the most interesting examples of this is furnished by the Galapagos Islands, an example the more remarkable that no one who has read in Darwin's fascinating "Journal" the description of these islands, can have failed to perceive that the peculiarities of this strange Archipelago must have been prominent among the facts which first planted in his mind the germ of that theory of the origin of species which has since grown to such gigantic dimensions. It is curious also to reflect that had the bearing of geological history on the facts of distribution been as well known forty years ago as it is now, the reasoning of the great naturalist on this and similar cases might have taken an entirely different direction.