OCEANIC DISPERSAL OF PLANTS. 285 



young barnacles (Balanus) and Hydroids. Amongst the logs were many whole uprooted trees. I 

 saw one of these two feet in diameter. The majority of the pieces were of small wood, branches and 

 small stems. The bark was often floating separately. The midribs of the leaves of some pinnate-leaved 

 palm were abundant, and also the stems of a large cane- grass (Sacclutrum), like that so abundant on 

 the shores of the great river Wai Levu, in Fiji. 1 One of these canes was fourteen feet in length, and 

 from one and a half to two inches in diameter. Various fruits of trees and other fragments were 

 abundant, usually floating, confined in the midst of the small aggregations into which tho floating 

 timber was almost everywhere gathered. Amongst them were the usual littoral seeds, fruits of two 

 species of Pamdanus, of Heritiera littoralis, of a Barringtonia, and of Ipomoea pes~capree. But besides 

 these fruits of littoral plants, there were seeds [and seed-vessels] of forty or fifty species of more 

 inland plants. Very small seeds were as abundant as large ones, the surface-scum being full of 

 them, so that they could be scooped up in quantities with a fine net. With the seeds occurred one 

 or two flowers, or parts of them. I observed an entire absence of leaves, excepting those of the 

 palm, on the midribs of which some of the pinna? were still present. The leaves evidently drop first 

 to the bottom, whilst vegetable drift is floating from ashore. Thus, as the rubbish sinks in the sea- 

 water, a deposit abounding in leaves, but with few fruits and little or no wood, will be formed 

 near shore, whilst the wood and fruits will sink to the bottom farther off land. Much of the wood 

 was floating suspended vertically in the water ; and, most curiously, logs and short branch pieces 

 thus floating often occurred in separate groups, apart from the horizontally floating timber. The 

 sunken ends of the wood were not weighted by any attached masses of soil or other load of any kind. 

 Possibly the water penetrates certain kinds of wood more easily in one direction, with regard to its 

 growth , than the other. Hence one end becomes water-logged before the other : I could arrive at 

 no other explanation of the circumstance. It is evident that a wide area of the sea off the mouth of 

 the Ambernoh River is thus constantly covered with driftwood, for the floating wood is inhabited by 

 various animals, which seem to belong to it, as it were. The fruits and woods were covered with the 

 eggs of a Gasteropod Mollusk and with a Hydroid, and the interstices were filled with Radiolarians 

 washed into them, and gathered in masses just as Diatoms in the Antarctic Seas are gathered together 

 in the honeycombed ice. Two species of crab inhabit the logs in abundance, and a small Dendroccele 

 Planarian swarms all over the drift matter, and on the living crabs also. A Lepas was common on 

 the logs." 



1 No recognisable specimen of this grass reached Kew. 



