The islands of the Pacific and East Indies made an enormous and fateful impact on the minds of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, the fathers of modem evolutionary theory. Since then island floras and faunas have continued to playa central role in the development of evolutionary, and more recently ecological thought. For much ofthis century island ecology was a descriptive science and a wealth of information has been amassed on patterns of species distributions, on the composition of island floras and faunas, on the classification of islands into types such as oceanic and continental, on the...