INTRODUCTION TO THE REPORTS ON INSULAR FLORAS. 1 1 



Here, as in so many Oceanic Islands, woody Composite are prominent among the 

 endemic plants. Bentham 1 states that none of the Galapagos Compositse show any 

 tendency to the arborescent forms observable in the more isolated insular groups, but 

 Andersson says " fifteen of the species are bushy, and several of them reach a height of 

 eight to ten ells, and nearly as much in circumference, thus resembling small trees." 

 What is more definite, he describes Macrcea laricifolia as "fere biorgyalis," and Scalesia 

 decurrens as " bi-triorgyalis ; " heights not surpassed by many of the Juan Fernandez and 

 St Helena arboreous members of the same Order. Four or five independent genera of 

 Composite have been founded on Galapagos plants, but only two of them are retained in 

 Bentham and Hooker's Genera Plantarum, the others being treated as sections of older 

 genera ; and the two retained (Scalesia and Lecocarpus) might without difficulty, Bentham 

 remarks, have been referred to Mirasolia and Melampodium respectively. Altogether 

 thirty-eight species of Composites are known from the group, and of these twenty-seven are 

 endemic. Other Orders largely represented by endemic species are the Rubiacese, Boraginese, 

 Amarantaceaa, Euphorbiaceae, and Gramineae. Only two orchids, an Epidendrum and a 

 Govenia, have been discovered. The affinities of the endemic element of the flora are 

 entirely American ; a very few species have congeners in the Sandwich Islands, such for 

 instance as LipochoBta laricifolia (Macrcea), and not in America ; but the singular arboreous 

 Lobeliaceae of the Sandwich Islands, which have their nearest affinities in America, are 

 wliolly wanting. Of the species common to the Galapagos and other countries, Andersson 

 finds that forty-two of them are also found in Africa ; forty in India and the Malayan 

 Archipelago ; fifteen in Australia ; and forty-three are more or less widely spread in 

 Polynesia. 



THE SEYCHELLES. 



This group consists of upwards of thirty islands, about 900 miles distant from Mada- 

 gascar, the largest, Mahe, being seventeen miles long, and about 30,000 acres in area, 

 with an altitude of 3000 feet. According to Baker (Flora of Mauritius, Preface, p. 16*), 

 the number of wild flowering plants and ferns then (1877) known to grow in the Seychelles 

 was 338, of which sixty are endemic. Besides the sixty endemic species, between twenty 

 and thirty are characteristic Mascarene types, and the remaining 250 mostly plants of wide 

 dispersion. The composition of the endemic element in the flora of the Seychelles is 

 totally different from that of any other oceanic group, yet it is not less remarkable. Out 

 of the sixty endemic species, fourteen are Rubiacese, two are Composite, two are Orchidese, 

 three are Pandanus, and six are vascular cryptogams. With the exception of Mechtsa- 

 gyne opp>ositifolia, a monotypic genus of the Ternstrcemiaceae, the endemic genera are all 

 Palmse. They are : Lodoicea sechellarum, Deckenia nobilis," Nephrosperma vanhoutteana, 



1 Journal of the Linnean Society of London, xiii. p. 557. 



2 In Bentham and Hooker's Genera Plantarum, iii. p. 898, Deckenia is reduced to the peculiarly Mascarene 

 genus Acanthojihoenix. 



