142 Rhodora [JULY 
species, a large flora which on the continent occupies a fairly definite and 
broad belt between the Hudsonian element of Class I and the group 
of species embraced in Class III. Typical ranges of these Canadian 
plants are shown in plates 90 and 91, indicating the distribution of 
Aster macrophyllus (fig. 11), perhaps the most common Aster of the east- 
ern Canadian forests, and of the Arbor Vitae, Thuja occidentalis (fig. 
12), one of the most abundant and valuable trees of eastern Canada. 
Here indeed is an anomalous situation. Although from the 
insular position of Newfoundland we should naturally expect that 
her flora would lack many species, it is certainly by more than a mere 
coincidence that the island lacks a large proportion of the most typical 
plants which on the mainland to the west abound in similar latitudes 
and under essentially identical conditions of climate and soil, but at 
the same time possesses so large a proportion of the Arctic-alpine 
flora mingled, often in closest proximity, with plants characteristic 
of southern New England, and even of the Cretaceous and Tertiary 
clays and sands of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. The presence on 
the island of the 466 Boreal plants of Class I (594 per cent of the 
whole flora) is apparently simple to explain, for the northern peninsula 
of Newfoundland is separated from the Labrador Peninsula merely 
by the Straits of Belle Isle which are in many places only 11 or 12 
miles across. The endemic plants and those not known upon the 
continent of North America (Class IV) may also be passed for the 
present since, when that country is better known, the latter will 
presumably be found in Labrador, and since the endemic plants are 
without exception minor variants or immediate relatives of conti- 
nental types, showing that the flora of the island is of comparatively 
recent origin; in this resembling the flora of the Faeróes, a region 
which, as Warming states, forms “a strong contrast to other Atlantic 
islands, viz. the Azores, Madeira, and the Canaries, which are rich 
in endemic species, and have a flora which is very old, related to that 
of the Tertiary time; this can only be accounted for by the fact that no 
Glacial Period destroyed the old plant-world of these islands.” ! 
The greatest problem, and the only one with which we will at present 
deal, concerns Classes II and III, the typical Canadian flora which 
_ is very meagrely represented in Newfoundland, and the somewhat 
1 Warming: The History of the Flora of the Faeróes. Botany of the Faeróes, ii. 
662 (1903). 
