No XIV. BOTANY. 301 



No. XIV. 



BOTANY. 

 By Sir Joseph D. Hooker, C.B., K.C.S.I., 



President Royal Society. 



With Lists of Flowering Plants, by Professor D. Oliver; Musci, by 

 W. Mitten ; Fungi, by Rev. W. J. Berkeley ; Alg^e and Diatoma- 

 ce^e, by Professor George Dickie. 



The very excellent collections of flowering plants and ferns 

 brought by Captain Feilden and Mr. Hart from lat. 80°-83° 

 North, along the shores of Kennedy Channel, Hall Basin, 

 and Robeson Channel, and particularly from the N.E. part of 

 Grinnell Land, have been examined and named by Professor 

 Oliver, by comparison with the Arctic collections at Kew. 

 They prove that the vegetation of this meridian of the Polar 

 area is entirely Greenlandic, showing no further relationship 

 than does Greenland itself to the floras of the American 

 Polar islands to the west of it and of Spitsbergen to the east 

 of it. In other words, it possesses Greenland plants that are 

 wanting in either or in both of these localities, and wants 

 plants that either or both of these regions possess, but which 

 are absent in Greenland. 



In my essay on the ' Outlines of the Distribution of Arctic 

 Plants,' ! I have shown that the Greenland flora was in origin 

 essentially a European one; but owing to causes which I 

 have there attempted to explain, it has lost some of its Euro- 

 pean characteristics, and acquired others, of which some few 



1 ' Trans. Linn. Soc.,' xxiii. 251. 



