ILLUSTRATIONS (23). ACICTJLAR-LEAVED TREES. 319 



cedar near the River Beirut, that is, the Hydaspes, furnished 

 the timber for the fleet of Nearchus. In the valley of Dude- 

 gaon, north of the copper mines of Dhunpoor in Nepaul, Dr. 

 Hoffmeister, so early lost to science, found in a forest the 

 Pinus longifolia (Royle), or the Tschelu Fir, mixed with the 

 lofty stems of a palm — Chameerops martiana (WaUich).* 

 Such an interspersion of the pineta and palmeta had already, 

 in the new continent, excited the astonishment of the 

 companions of Columbus, as a friend and contemporary of 

 the admiral's, Petrus Martyr Anghiera, relates. f I myself 

 saw, for the first time, this blending of pines with palms on 

 the road from Acapulco to Chilpanzingo. The Himalaya, like 

 the Mexican highlands, besides its genera of pine and cedar, 

 possesses also forms of the Cypress (Cupressus tondosa, Don.); 

 of the Yew ( Taxus Wallichiana, Zuccar. ) ; of the Podocarpus 

 (Podocarpus nereifolia, Brown) ; and the Juniper (Juniperus 

 squamata, Don., and J. excelsa, Bieberst. ; the latter species 

 occurring also at Schipke in Thibet, in Asia Minor, Syria, 

 and the Grecian Islands; on the other hand, Thuja, Tax- 

 odium, Larix, and Araucaria, are forms of the New Continent, 

 which are wanting in the Himalaya. 



Besides the twenty species of pine with which we are 

 acquainted in Mexico, the United States of North America, 

 in their present extension to the Pacific, present forty-five 

 described species, whilst all Europe can only enumerate fifteen. 

 The same difference between abundance and paucity of forms is 

 shown in the oaks, in favour of the New Continent (a quarter of 

 the world the most connected and most elongated in a meri- 

 dional direction). It has, however, been very recently demon- 

 strated by the extremely accurate researches of Siebold and 

 Zuccarini to be an erroneous assertion, that many European 

 species of pine, in consequence of their wide distribution 

 throughout Northern Asia, passed over to the Japanese islands, 

 and there mingled with a genuine Mexican species, the Wey- 

 mouth pine (Pinus strobus, L.), as Thunberg asserts. What 

 Thunberg considered to be European species of pine, are spe- 

 cies entirely different. Thunberg's Red Pine (Pinus abies, 

 Linn.) is P. polita, Sieb., and often planted near Buddhist 

 temples; his northern common fir (Pinus sylvestris) is P. 



* See Hoffmeister's Briefe aus Indien wahrend der Expedition des 

 Prinzen Waldemar von Preussen, 1847, s. 351. 

 f Dec. iii. lib. x. p. 68. 



