40 THE BOTANY OF BERMUDA. 



Walsingham tract." This remarkable region is a narrow ridge, about 

 two miles long and from a quarter to half a mile wide, which separates 

 Castle Harbor from Harrington Sound, at the east end of the islands, 

 and does not altogether comprise above 200 acres, including Tucker's 

 Town. It contains nearly the whole of the indigenous vegetation of 

 the group. A few characteristic species, such as Eandia aculeata, 

 Pavonia spimfex, Myginda Rhacoma, are only found at the other end, 

 and a few are diffused here and there pretty generally. Such are 

 Eugenia axillaris, Forestiera imrulosa, and Dodonwa viscosa. But, on the 

 whole, this small tract is the Mecca of the botanist in Bermuda, and his 

 pilgrimages will be many before he exhausts it. For this we must, of 

 course, seek a geological cause. This narrow ridge of land, honey- 

 combed by caverns, fretted with the dissolving rains of ages, and rent 

 by fissures, is, in the writer's opinion, the last sur\dving contemporary 

 of former Bermudas that have disappeared, whose surface-rocks form 

 the reefs that fill Castle Harbor and both the sounds, and form the 

 northern barriers against the fury of the Atlantic. The evidence in 

 support of this opinion would be out of place in this section. It will be 

 evident that if such be the case, we should expect to find here, as we 

 do find it, the greatest accumulation of those species which, not being 

 capable of self-origination anywhere, can only have reached this very 

 isolated spot by the slow operation of natural causes long continued. 

 The surface of the contemporary Bermuda is not of high geological 

 antiquity, as follows necessarily from its J^olian origin and its contin- 

 uous subsidence, but what it has of antiquity is to all ai>pearance found 

 here. 



The following is a list of 25 species exclusively or almost exclusively 

 to be looked for in the Walsingham tract. They are nearly all West 

 Indian; few of them American in the sense of belonging to regions of 

 corresponding latitude on the continent. 



^schynomeue, sp - W. I. 



Ampelopsis quiuquefolia A. 



Asplenium crennlatuni 



Aspleuium myriopliyllum 



C<allicari)a ferr uginea W. I. 



Chiococca raceraosa W.I. 



Dodontea viscosa W. I. 



Elajodendron xylocarpum W. I. 



Eugenia axillaris W. I. 



Forestiera porulosa W. I. 



Guilandina Bonducella W. I. 



Ipom(Ba purpurea W. I. 



Jasminum gracile AV. I. 



Jatropba Curcas W. I. 



Passillora ciliata W. I. 



Peperomia obtnsifolia W. I. 



Psilotnm triqnetrura W. I. 



Psycliotria uudata W. I. 



Ptcris heteropliylla W. I. 



Sabal Adansonii A. 



Sieyos augulatus A. 



Sponia Laraarckiana W. I. 



StatieeLimoniuiUjVar. Caroliniaua. A. 



Triumfetta semitriloba W. I. 



Xautlioxylum Clava-Herculis W. I. 



