The Archipelagos of Taiwan literature

We compare literatures somewhat like Charles Darwin’s islands. In his travel in the Galapagos Archipelago, Darwin notices how finches on different islands develop different beaks in accordance to their environments. Comparing, and searching for a rule of differences, Darwin then develops the theory explaining the origin of species. Yet he needs first to recognize the islands. He recounts his first impression of the archipelago thus: “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” (1845: 394). ¹ Thus he does not initially comprehend the useful units of comparison until he realizes later that the variations of finches are consistent with their island locations, and that “each variety is constant in its own Island,” as Darwin remarks in his notebook (qtd. in Sulloway 1982: 12). This realization makes islands the ideal laboratories for his theory. Isolated and small, an island seems to secure coherence and consistency among its specimens. The ostensible similarities between the islands prove a further advantage for him to locate simple variables that determine differences. ² Islands are the perfect units of comparison.