Hamilton. — Notes on a Visit to Macquarie Island. 565 



a shrub or plant large enough to make a penholder. Indeed, 

 the only plant of a ligneous genus is the small creeping 

 Coprosma rcpcns. 



From the list given by Professor Scott, and the revision of 

 the Macquarie Island plants published by Mr. T. Kirk in 

 the Proceedings of the Australasian Association for the Ad- 

 vancement of Science, it was evident that there was very little 

 chance of finding any useful shrubs ; so before leaving Dun- 

 edin I determined to try and establish some on the island 

 that might some day be of use, at any rate, for firewood. Mr. 

 Matthews, of Mornington, kindly gave me a large bag of seeds 

 of several New Zealand Pittosporums, and of a variety of de- 

 ciduous trees. Messrs. Howden and Moncrief also gave me 

 some seeds of several varieties of pines. I also took a quan- 

 tity of cabbage-seed. I took the opportunity of sowing these 

 seeds in various places around Lusitania Bay, and I trust that 

 some of them may become established. Somehow the very 

 seed that we ought to have taken — manuka {Lcptosp>ermum) — 

 nobody thought of. This would have been probably the best 

 calculated to succeed in that climate, and would have been of 

 service for fuel. The time of year was an unfavourable one 

 for the experiment, as the winter was just coming on, and the 

 germinating plants would experience the cold at the most 

 critical time. The large Poa tussocks are the great feature of 

 the low levels, and on the hill-tops the special feature is the 

 Azorella, masses of bright-green closely-growing convex masses 

 of stems and leaves. These masses are so solid and elastic as 

 to bear the weight of a man without material injury. Em- 

 bedded in the substance of this cushion grow two small but 

 interesting plants — Coprosma repens, with its striking dimor- 

 phous flowers and scarlet berries ; and a very minute form of 

 a fern, Poly podium australc, the frond of which is about -Jin. 

 long. This truly alpine form I have collected on the top 

 of the Kaweka Mountains, in Hawke's Bay. Two other 

 ferns are found on the island : the one is Lomaria alpina, the 

 other Aspidium aculeatum, var. vestitum. The plants which I 

 collected on the island have been submitted to my friend Mr. 

 Kirk and to Mr. Petrie, and I have to thank them very 

 heartily for the trouble they have taken in identifying the 

 specimens. I had hoped to find something very new and 

 striking in an island which the soundings show to be sepa- 

 rated by a deep submarine valley of 1,000 fathoms from New 

 Zealand, but the results seem to support the conclusion arrived 

 at in the report on the "Challenger" voyage: that the com- 

 position of the vegetation of the remotely-separated exceed- 

 ingly small islands in the southern seas, on the extreme limit 

 of phanerogamic life, is practically the same all round the 

 globe, and is, in all probability, the remains of a more ex- 



