450 ANNUAL KEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



extreme before the migration route between Australia and South 

 America had closed. The large and heavy seeds of these trees possess 

 no floating power and are unfitted for dispersal by birds. As Dr. 

 Guppy remarks of the Fijian Kauri pine, "they may well be cited in 

 support of any continental hypothesis." (Guppy, "Naturalist in the 

 Pacific," vol. 2, 1906, p. 301.) 



The preponderance of Araucaria in the Pacific is enforced by a 

 related genus Agathis. If statistics carry a meaning, Fagus would 

 seem to have come to Australasia from America, while Araucaria 

 made the reverse journey. 



The remarkable and well-known genus Fuchsia includes 69 species. 

 Four of these are natives of New Zealand, the rest inhabit South 

 America, Mexico, and the West Indies. These figures are almost 

 exactly reversed for the shrubby evergreen Veronicas, plants con- 

 spicuous in any New Zealand landscape, totally absent from Australia 

 or Tasmania, and represented by a few stragglers in South America 

 and Fuegia. 



4. DEDUCTIONS. 



If it be resolved that the community of austral life is explicable 

 only by former radiation along land routes from the south polar 

 regions, we reach a position to probe deeper into the intricacies of 

 the problem. 



In the scheme propounded by Dr. H. O. Forbes, the austral forms 

 inhabited one vast continent, nearly a third of the Southern Hemi- 

 sphere, at the same ( ? Pleistocene) time. But an analysis of the 

 fauna in question shows that some groups avoid Tasmania and others 

 avoid New Zealand. Clearly the Antarctica that supplied Australia 

 mth an abundant fauna of marsupials, monotremes, snakes, frogs, 

 and so on, was not in touch with New Zealand, where these animals 

 are conspicuously absent. Benliam has emphasized the fact that. the 

 AcanthrodrUids, Antarctic earthworms, failed to reach Tasmania. 

 "Wlien they, the fuschias and other associates, spread backward and 

 forw^ard from New Zealand to South America, it is equally clear that 

 the road to Tasmania w^as barred to them. Iredale remarks (Proc. 

 Malac. Soc, vol. 9, 1910, p. 160) that the Antarctic element in the New 

 Zealand Polyplacophora, a marine molluscan group, is distinct from 

 that which reached Tasmania from the south. The differences are 

 both positive and negative, and are not due merely to the more south- 

 ern latitude of Now Zealand preserving a larger proportion of cold 

 types. When circumstances allowed Iguanidse to wander from South 

 America in two genera to Madagascar and in another to Fiji, the 

 Australian road was apparently closed to them. 



It becomes increasingly apparent that the Antarctic source of 

 austral life was not simple but compound. This complexity has 



