Antarctic Plants in Polynesia 309 



J. D. Hooker, Diels, Setchell, Lam, Cockayne, and others 

 speak, as I have here, o£ an Antarctic (or Paleantarctic) element, 

 meaning that its original home should be sought in Antarctica. 

 Miss Gibbs rejects this idea/ She notes "the relation between the 

 mountain flora of North- West New Guinea and the so-called 

 Antarctic flora" (p. 105), and gives a list of genera including 

 Oreobolus, Astelia, Acaena, Gunnera, Coprosma, and Lageno- 

 phora. According to her ideas, however, this element is not at 

 all Antarctic, but Papuan; the mountains of New Guinea she 

 considers to be the focus of development and distribution of the 

 "Antarctic" plants, justifying the term "Papuan austral-mon- 

 tane" instead of Antarctic, on the strength of both geological 

 and meteorological data. The geological evidence would seem 

 to be that "the present configuration of the New Guinea ranges 

 dates from Tertiary time, the South American Cordillera ac- 

 cording to present geological data was raised from below sea 

 level in the Quaternary period, approximating to the epoch in 

 which Tasmania assumed her present form!' 



Even if these statements were correct — the South American 

 Cordillera is Tertiary and was the center of a glaciation con- 

 temporaneous with the Boreal Ice Age — the Antarctic floras still 

 could have originated in the Antarctic continent. According to 

 Miss Gibbs, this great land mass has been of no consequence 

 whatever in the biological history of the southern hemisphere. 

 The meteorological evidence implies that, in the strata above 

 the trade wind, a poleward return wind blows. The wind is 

 northwest and is supposed to have carried plant, also animal, 

 life from its birthplace in New Guinea to southeastern Australia, 

 Tasmania, New Zealand, and South America. This is a very bold 

 theory indeed. To begin with, how many of the genera involved 

 are wind-borne? Few, if any. Oreobolus and Lagenophora have 



