524 Taylor. Endemism in the Bahama Flora. 



antiquity of endemics could not be measured by their dispersal. For in 

 some cases, particularly among the relicts of the pine-barrens, unquestioned 

 antiquity goes with rather restricted distribution. 



In the Bahama flora, necessarily a recent one, due to the geological 

 youth of the islands, a somewhat detailed study of the endemics as 

 contrasted with the non-endemic flora shows that these two floral elements 

 are not widely different as to their dispersal. 



Endemics. Non-ende?nics. 

 Found only on one island ..... 29.5 % 20.3 % 



Found only on two islands . . . . . 14.5 13.7 



Found only on three islands .... 13-6 9.3 



Found on many islands . . . . . 42.4 56-7 



The essential similarity of these percentages warrants the statement 

 that the dispersal of endemics in the Bahamas is not very different from 

 that of the general flora of the archipelago. It may not be shooting 

 beyond the mark to suggest that the dispersal, or, as Dr. Willis prefers to 

 call it, the commonness or rarity of endemics, may be dictated by forces 

 that play as well upon the endemic as upon the non-endemic elements of 

 the Bahama flora. 



Of those endemics confined to a single island, which constitute 29-5 

 per cent, of the endemic flora, and which might perhaps be considered the 

 rarest, Dr. Britton has written the following for this paper : 



1 In almost all cases of which record was made by the collectors of 

 endemics inhabiting, as far as known, only one island, the plants grow 

 in large or considerable quantities. A few species are known from but a 

 single specimen, or few, but wider search might reveal them in quantity.' 



Both from the record of their distribution, and from the observations 

 of those most competent to make them, it is thus apparent that the age 

 of endemics in the Bahamas cannot be measured either by their dispersal or 

 by their frequency. 



The geological youth of the islands is reflected in the lack of endemic 

 genera, only Neobracca, a shrub of the Apocynaceae, being peculiar to the 

 region. If, as most students of distribution agree, endemic genera are to 

 be considered as badges of antiquity, and they have been so interpreted in 

 St. Helena, Galapagos, Hawaii, and hosts of isolated islands, then the lack 

 of them in the Bahamas should brand that flora with the stigma of youth, 

 if the geologists had not already compelled us to do so. Such a recent 

 flora, scattered over a rather restless archipelago, so far as subsidence and 

 emergence is concerned, ought to show among its endemics a goodly 

 proportion of herbaceous species. For it has also been shown, for at least 

 some regions, that endemic species in non-endemic genera are mostly herbs, 

 which from the brevity of their life-cycle are assumed to have greater 

 opportunity to become developed than woody plants. As the Bahamas 



