CoCKATNE. — Plants of Chatham Island. 315 



way from New Zealand to the Chathams without much 

 difficulty. The sparrow and the blackbird, both now a 

 nuisance on Chatham Island, reached that land, as pointed 

 out before, unaided by man ; the smoke of bush-fires from 

 the North Island of New Zealand at times fills the air of 

 Chatham Island when the wind blows from the north-east ; 

 finally, logs have again and again been cast up on all the 

 sea-beaches. Old logs of Podocarpus totara are to be found 

 in considerable numbers in the vicinity of the north coast 

 buried under sand and in the beds of creeks, while in some 

 places they occur at some distance inland, although there is 

 no reason to think that such trees grew on the island. 



But I do not think we need postulate any carriage over a 

 broad tract of ocean for the Chatham Island plants ; on the 

 contrary, the geological evidence in favour of a wide extension 

 of New Zealand eastwards is very strong, while zoological^ and 

 botanical support is not wanting. With regard to this latter, 

 I am not in a position to make any further additions, either 

 confirmatory or the contrary, to my recently published state- 

 ments (10) regarding the difference in the life-history of 

 certain so-called species according as they are indigenous to 

 New Zealand or the Chatham Islands, so I reserve dealing 

 with this part of my subject until such time as a number of 

 seedling plants now under control are sufficiently developed 

 for me to speak in a definite and exact manner as to their 

 behaviour. All that can be said now on this head is that an 

 examination of the conditions of life on Chatham Island 

 has convinced me that local edaphic influences have played a 

 greater part in modifying the vegetation than I had supposed, 

 and that in consequence, although some of the plants of the 

 Chatham Islands may much resemble certain Pliocene plants 

 of New Zealand, the flora as a whole is not identically what 

 it was in the Pliocene period, for some species must have de- 

 viated very considerably from the original type. 



One of the difficulties that suggests itself in the way of 

 accepting actual land -connection between New Zealand 

 and the Chathams, and which supports the view that the 

 breadth of ocean between the two lands must always have 

 been wide, is the absence in the Chatham Islands of so 

 many characteristic New Zealand genera ; for it seems in- 

 conceivable, for example, that so common a New Zea- 

 land plant as Cordyline australis, or that so few of the other 

 New Zealand species having fruits readily carried by birds, 

 should not have reached the Chathams, even if there had 



* One of the strongest zoological proofs is the migration from Chat- 

 ham Island of the New Zealand shining cuckoo, a New Zealand migra- 

 tory bird. As to the significance of this, see Captain Hutton's paper, 

 " Our Migratory Birds " (33 s ). 



