SS BY Sh eee SEO ae oh eeA, Se | os en ES a She yn. ea alee eet al ga 
BOTANICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE AZORES. 87 
graphical table will be desirable. It is rather surprising to 
note that the present list has very little in common with 
Dr. Roth’s list of plants which follow the Atlantic Ocean 
on the west coast of Europe.* 
No difficulty is found in seeing how most of the existing 
species may have been indroduced by ordinary means, 
largely through human agency, since the discovery of the 
islands, for they are so precisely comparable with similarly 
named species from other parts of the world as to suggest 
the lapse of a very short time, as time is measured by the 
evolutionist, since their separation from the parent stock. 
Some of the species at one time thought to be peculiar to 
the islands, —e. g., Solidago sempervirens, —are now 
known not to be, so that they naturally fall in with those 
just mentioned; and notwithstanding the study that has 
been given to them by a number of careful botanists, 
others, perhaps, may share the same fate. Only the 
few species marked by the use of heavy-faced type, 
therefore, remain as peculiarly Azorean. So far as 
may be judged from their distribution and affinities, the 
ancestors of these seem to have been introduced by 
drift, migratory birds, etc., so long ago as to have allowed 
descendants in the original habitat and the new home to 
depart enough from the original type to become clearly 
separable as species. While some of these peculiar species 
are limited to one and others to another island or sub-group 
of islands, the truly native flora, which evidently has 
always been scanty, has clearly suffered so greatly through 
the inroads of man and domesticated animals, since the 
settlement of the Azores, that it is no longer possible to 
say whether or not these local limitations have always 
existed. Though it might, perhaps, be expected, no dif- 
ferentiation has yet been shown comparable with that seen 
in the plants of different islands of the Galapagos group in 
* E. Roth, Ueber die Pflanzen, welche den Atlantischen Ocean auf der 
Westkiiste Europas begleiten. Abhandl. bot. Verein Prov. Branden- 
burg. 25: 132. 
