5 28 La SAN 
24.523 
D Le 
1911] Fernald,— Expedition to Newfoundland 147 
often highly efficient in transporting and distributing plants or their 
fragments or fruits, the broad lower St. Lawrence, like a great drift- 
ing sea, accomplishes little toward populating the shores near its 
mouth with the plants from farther up-stream; and in this service 
not only the current of the St. Lawrence but the currents in the Gulf 
have been conspicuously ineffective in carrying to Newfoundland 
the plants which abound on the continent. 
FLoATING Ice AND Logs. These may well be efficient in bring- 
ing boreal plants upon the coast of Newfoundland, but for the 
reasons explained in the consideration of ocean-currents they appar- 
ently have carried few if any southwestern types to the island. 
Winns. Warming feels that in case of the Faeróes winds are 
sufficient to have carried upon those islands most of the plants they 
have received from Scotland, but Ostenfeld urges that many species 
have seeds too heavy for ready transportation by this means. In the 
case of Newfoundland it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that the 
plants of Class I, the Boreal Species, which, as we have seen, might 
readily be brought from the Labrador side of the Straits of Belle Isle 
by birds, ocean-currents or floating ice and logs, could as readily have 
been transported by the winds; for the distance is so slight that the 
light seed (or spores) — of Botrychium Lunaria, Lycopodium Selago, 
Eriophorum Chamissonis, Salix, Populus balsamifera, etc.— might 
readily be wafted across, and the dried fragments or heavier fruits 
of other plants blown across on the comparatively short ice-bridge 
formed in severe winters. But the distance across Cabot Strait, the 
shortest route from the southwestern mainland to Newfoundland is 
fully 70 miles, and, although this does not seem a forbidding gap, the 
fact remains that very many common Canadian species with fine 
spores or with the seeds plumose, feathery or otherwise adapted for 
wind-transportation have failed to cross from Cape Breton to south- 
western Newfoundland. Among such plants perfectly adapted, 
it would seem, for wind-transportation, at least in heavy gales or 
in winter when advantage can be taken of broad fields of ice, are 
Lycopodium sabinaefolium, Adiantum pedatum, Dryopteris marginalis, 
Pyrola elliptica and Chimaphila umbellata, with very minute spores 
Thalictrum dioicum probably T. confine which is a characteristic plant about the Gulf 
of St. Lawrence; his 7. purpurascens (a species unknown as far east as New England) 
is undoubtedly the common T. polygamum which he does not list; and his Viola 
rostrata (a woodland species very rare east of the Connecticut valley) is more likely 
V. labradorica, arenaria, or adunca, all of which occur about the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 
