THE PLANT WOELD 145 



A SCANTY FLORA. 



By Heney E. Baum. 



A PAUCITY of vegetation on circumscribed islands is no unusual 

 tiling, and, indeed, the occurrence of numerous forms of plant 

 life on sucli islets is to be treated as an exception rather than as 

 a rule. But when the sum total of vegetation is obtained after only 

 three forms have been enumerated, we have a condition, to say the 

 least, rather out of the ordinary. This large and verdant flora covers, 

 in places, the red sandstone of Bird Rock, one of the most famous of 

 the bird rookeries of our northern waters. Forming the extreme north- 

 ern tip of the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, this rock 

 rises cliff-like from the sea, attaining occasionally a height of nearly 

 two hundred feet, its top being practically inaccessible to all creatures 

 without wings until the erection of a lighthouse on its summit by the 

 Canadian government in 1869. Visitors now reach the top by means of 

 a bucket and windlass. Two smaller rocks lie about a half-mile from 

 Great Bird, the intervening shallow water testifying to their former 

 coniiection with the main rock. 



This rock has long been famous as a sea-bird rookery, and numer- 

 ous records of the habits of its feathered citizens have been left by 

 various scientists whose attention has been claimed by the excess of 

 bird life, to the entire exclusion of the sparse and small flora. In the 

 summer of 1900, however. Miss E. M. Leech, of Washington, spent 

 some little time on the island, and made a careful collection of all the 

 forms of plant life found gromng on the summit. On examination 

 these proved to consist of Poa compressa L., Achillea borealis Bong, 

 (given in Index Keioensis as a synonym for A. millefolium L.), and 

 Planfago mariUma L., and as these specimens appear to be the first to 

 be collected in this corner of the world, it seems desirable to record 

 them. 



To determine with any ai)proximation of correctness the origin of 

 this flora seems to be largely a matter of individual opinion. The fact 

 of its presence, however, before the advent of man has been established 

 by Professor A. S. Packard, who in 1854 reported that " but for a cen- 

 tral patch of brown and green herbage," the island was turned white 

 by the great numbers of female nesting gannets. Just 330 years before, 

 Jacques Cartier, the St. Malo seaman, on discovering these rocks 

 entered in his journal this choice bit, here given in the quaint English 

 translation of Hakluyt : 



" The Hands were as full of birds, as any field or medow is of 

 grasse, which there do make their nestes; and in the greatest of them 

 there was a great and infinite number of those that wee call Margaulx, 



