"The Galápagos Islands arose as a series of violent volcanic eruptions from a convulsing deep ocean floor on the northeastern section of the . Slowly the islands grew, seething and fuming rising in fiery violence above the surface of the central eastern Pacific in awe-inspiring desolation. In this astonishing isolation they came to harbor living organisms found nowhere else on Earth. Though the islands appear to have no close geologic affinities with the mainland of North and South America, their native derive in the main from the American ."