20 The Irish Naturalist. February, 



LUSITANIA AND KERRY: A BOTANICAL 



PARALLEL. 



BY NATHANIEL COLGAN, M.R.I. A. 



The flora of Portugal, the classic Lusitahia, has had a 

 peculiar interest for Irish botanists ever since Edward 

 Forbes in his well-known Geological Survey Memoir of 

 1846 drew attention to those western and south-western 

 Irish plants, which are usually spoken of as the Lusitanian 

 group. The existence of this interest coupled with the fact 

 that the Portuguese language and literature are almost 

 completely neglected in this country may be pleaded as 

 sufficient excuse for giving here a short abstract of the 

 results yielded by a botanical exploration of the highest 

 mountain region of Portugal made so long ago as 1881. 

 With the Relatorio or report of this survey, a copy of which 

 recently came into my possession, most Irish botanists are 

 probably unfamiliar. It is a folio brochure of 133 pages, in 

 the Portuguese vernacular, printed at Lisbon in 1883, and 

 drawn up by Dr. Julio Augusto Henriques, Professor of 

 Botany in the University of Coimbra, and one of the native 

 botanists who carried out the survey. The region dealt with 

 is the Serra da Estrella, the mountain chain, chiefly granitic, 

 which stretches north-eastward from Coimbra for about 

 50 miles, and attains a height of rather more than 6,500 

 feet under 40 1 degrees of north latitude. 



The survey, which included botanical exploration 

 amongst its objects, w^as carried out under the auspices of 

 the Lisbon Geographical Society, and dealt very exhaus- 

 tively with the natural history of the region. The inter- 

 pretation given to that essentially flexible term, Natural 

 History, was even freer than it received in our happily 

 accomplished Clare Island Survey ; for in addition to the 

 usual branches of botany, zoology, geology, meteorology, 

 and anthropology, the Portuguese survey had sections 

 dealing witli chemistry, hydrography, lake soundings, 



