Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Log of the Schooner "Academy" On a Voyage of Scientific Research to the Galapagos Islands, 1905-1906
For some time previous to the year 1905 the late Mr. Leverett Mills Loomis, then Director of the Museum of the California Academy of Sciences, had in mind the sending of an expedition to the Galapagos Islands, an archipelago situ ated on the equator 650 miles off the coast of Ecuador, and made famous to every naturalist by Charles Darwin, whose account of the voyage of H. M. S. Beagle has become a classic amongst students of nature.
The Galapagos have been visited several times since by naturalists but their stops were all too short and the means at their disposal for carrying on their investigations very limited. It was the idea of Mr. Loomis to send out an expedition that would have ample time to make an exhaustive survey, most extensive collections, and, most of all, to make a thorough study of the status of the gigantic land tortoises and secure specimens of the various species before it proved too late. The result was that an expedition was organized and sent out, remaining in the field for 17 months and one day, and bring ing back the largest and finest collections ever made on the islands. The study of the land tortoises, of which 266 speci mens were collected, resulted in straightening out many diffi cult problems, and, with the exception of Charles Island, showed them to be still living on all of the islands in the archi pelago from which they were formally known and that they even existed on islands they were never before known to be on.
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