"The significance of the differences in tortoises between islands did not strike him as important until it was too late, as he continued,
"I did not for some time pay sufficient attention to this statement, and I had already partially mingled together the collections from two of the islands.I never dreamed that islands, about fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted".