32 ' AIÎT. 19. — B. HAY ATA : 



This fact lias led me to think that these plants once ranged 

 over all the continent but became extinct there, while they have 

 still snrvived in the islands, owing to their insnlar conditions'^ 



This opinion will, however, not satisfactorily explain why the 

 plants, which are found still living in the islands, do not also 

 survive in so sheltered a place as Tein-ling-shan'\ where the 

 flora is quite as rich as it is in Japan and Formosa. It is very 

 reasonable to think that in the so called coast provinces of 

 China, the disturbances were so severe as to destroy these 

 inhabitants of peculiar character. But, why in the protected 

 centre of China ? 



It seems to me that insular conditions are not the only 

 cause of the floristic afïinity of the two regions, (Japan and 

 Formosa) and I have wondered if this aflimty were not due to a 

 land- mass or mountain chains, which are by some geologists 

 conjectured to have existed between the islands in former ages'^\" 



In my paper " On the Distribution of the Formosan Conifers^\ 

 I referred to the probable derivation of the coniferous flora of 

 Formosa, and came to the conclusion that the floras of Japan and 

 Formosa have been developed in the border regions of the former 

 continent, the extention of which reached from Japan southwards 

 to the Loo-choo islands as far as Formosa ; while the flora of 

 central China has been formed in the centre of the continent. 



1) I am much impressed by the oj)inioii of Mr. Wallace who made the following con- 

 clusion in his " Island Life " ed-3, p. 404 : — " It is clear, therefore, that before Formosa was 

 separated from the mainland the above named animals or their ancestral types must have 

 ranged over the intervening country as far as the Himalayas on the west, Japan on the north, and 

 Borneo or the Philippines on the south ; and that after that event occurred the conditions were so 

 materially changed as to lead to the extinction of these species in what are now the coast provinces 

 of China, while they or their modified descendants continued to exist in the dense forests of the 

 Himalayas and the Malay Islands, and in such detached islands as Formosa and Japan. " 



2) DiELS, L.— Flora von Central-China, in Engl. Bot. Jahrb. XXIX. pp. 1C9-659. 



3) Hayata, B. — On the Distriljution of the Formosan Conifers, in Tokyo Bot. Mag. XIX. 

 pp. 43-Gl. 



