VOL, IV. | Flora of Guadalupe Island. wa 
The Island of Guadalupe, situated between 29 degrees lati- 
tude north, and about 150 miles west of the coast of Lower Cali- 
fornia, measures nearly nineteen miles in length from north to 
south, by six to seven in breadth. The highest peak, Mount 
Augusta, reaches 4,500 feet, but is hardly to be noticed as it 
stands near the centre of the island, only a few hundred feet 
higher than the surrounding plateau. Guadalupe is not exactly 
a table-land, as it has been described, but rather a succession of 
several plateaus at different altitudes, of ridges, of old craters, 
and of powerful lava dykes appearing to have sprung out from 
various points and flown in every direction. The volcanic action . 
which formed the island—now entirely subsided, there being no 
trace of thermal waters nor of gaseous emanations of any descrip- 
tion—must have been grand and powerful indeed, if one 
considers the remains of the circus of the primitive crater in the 
north part of the island, rising to more than 3000 feet above the 
sea level and fully four miles in diameter. Two-thirds of this 
circus still exists, the eastern part of it having been swallowed 
by the ocean in some later convulsion, and at the southern part, 
towards the centre of the island, this high ridge blends with the 
plateau where Mount Augusta rises, this last offering rio trace 
of eruptive crater, but of having given birth to immense currents 
of lava, most of them now covered with cypresses. 
The standing portions of the circus emerging from the sea on 
the north and northwestern side of the island are exceedingly 
steep and precipitous, cut by a few deep cafions, and with some 
adventitious and comparatively small cones of eruption. Just on 
the slope of one of them is to be seen the principal grove of 
palms (Zrythea edulis) with a few intermingled fine specimens 
of oaks and many more pines, the latter extending all over the 
northern part of the island, which in times past they must have 
covered with a very thick forest. ‘The immense crater was once 
filled up to the height of 2000 to 2500 feet, and a section of this 
plateau remains still unaltered in the shape of a crescent, its 
surface rising gently from north to south. Here are to be found 
the sole appreciable springs of water, evidently nourished by the 
fogs that at all seasons are very often brought by the predominat- 
ing northwest winds against the high overstanding ridge and 
