INTRODUCTION. XXXV 
sharper contrasts in the vegetation of different areas of this large region than there are 
in the Indian, the Australian, or anv of the southern regions. ‘The poverty in genera 
and species of the woody element of the European and West-American Floras and its 
extreme richness in the Floras of China and Japan and Eastern N. America are well 
known; but with very few exceptions the genera of the former Floras are represented 
in the latter. As Gray remarks:—“ All round the world in our zone the woods 
contain Pines and Firs and Larches, Cypresses and Junipers, Oaks and Birches, Willows 
and Poplars, Maples and Ashes, and the like” *. The distribution of many of the 
genera of herbaceous plants of the poorer Floras is even wider. Thus, in California, 
where there is an enormous development of peculiar genera of some orders, the 
Ranunculacee are represented by thirteen genera, whereof eleven are also British, and 
one other is European, and the solitary one remaining is anomalous and endemic, and 
has been referred to various natural orders. The Orchidacee, again, are represented 
by ten genera, eight of which are British. Calypso borealis is a native of Northern 
Europe and Siberia, and the monotypic Aplectrum ranges across the continent to the 
Atlantic, being the only one restricted to America. 
The subregions of Wallace’s palearctic and nearctic zoological regions are perhaps 
less in harmony with botanical subregions than those of any other part of the world. 
His Mediterranean and Mandshurian subregions in the Old World, and his Californian, 
Rocky Mountains, and Eastern United States in the New World, are, however, substan- 
tially identical with botanical subregions. It does not come within the scope of this 
sketch to examine and discuss all these subregions, but a few remarks follow on the 
Chinese and North-Mexican Floras, which have recently been more fully investigated. 
In a lecture delivered before the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1878, and after- 
wards published, Sir Joseph Hooker explains the main features of the distribution of 
the Flora of North America, and Professor C. S. Sargent has exhaustively described and 
elaborately illustrated cartographically the distribution of the arboreous element f; 
and Mr. C.J. Maximowicz has made a valuable contribution to the botanical geography 
of Central Asia in a paper which has already been referred tof. In these and various 
other more generally known publications much new light is thrown on the nature, 
composition, and distribution of the vegetation of the countries under consideration. 
With regard to Wallace’s Mandshurian or Japanese subregion, as already hinted, a 
corresponding botanical subregion would be differently bounded; its northern limit 
barely reaching Peking and its western limit not extending so far, if at all, into 
* « Forest Geography and Archeology,” Am. Journ. Sc. xvi. (1878) p. 183. 
+ ‘Report on the Forests of North America (exclusive of Mexico).’? Department of the Interior: Census 
Office, 1884. 
+ “Sur les Collections botaniques de la Mongolie et du Tibet septentrional (Tangout) recueillies récemment 
par des voyageurs Russes et conservées & St. Pétersbourg,” Bulletin du Congrés International de Botanique et 
d’Horticulture & St. Pétersbourg, 1884, pp. 135-196. 
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