Excerpt from The Wanderings of Plants and Animals From Their First Home That the animal and vegetable worlds - that is to say, the whole physiognomy of life, labour, and landscape in a country - may, in the course of centuries, be changed under the hand of Man is an experimental fact that, especially since the discovery of America, cannot be contradicted. During the, last three centuries - in a purely historical period, since the invention of printing, and in full view of the civilized world - the native animals and plants in newly discovered islands and in the colonized countries of the Western Hemisphere have been sup planted by those of europe, or by a flora and fauna collected from all parts of the globe. In St. Helena, for instance, the aboriginal wild vegetation has retreated to the mountains in the interior of the island, driven in by an advancing circle of novel plants which came over the ocean in the train of Europeans. In the pampas of Buenos Ayres, for miles together, we meet with scarcely one indigenous plant; they have all succumbed to the usurpation of plants introduced from Europe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.