28 PEOCEEDINaS OF THE 



and Mr. Elliot is entitled to his opinion. But there is a 

 remarkable genus of sedges, Mapania, established by Aublet on a 

 Guiana plant, and there are two or three other species of the same 

 genus known in Guiana. Now, quite recently collectors have 

 found in West Tropical Africa four or five species of Mapania all 

 distinct from the Guiana species, though, of the same section, and 

 fitting in among the Guiana species. 



I am not able to point out anything in this manner regarding 

 the atfinities of the Soondreebun Flora. 



I have said that the result of this tabulation of the distribution 

 of the Soondreebun cbaracteristic plants was to me successful, 

 in that it gets rid of all anomalies of distribution. 



(1) The areas of all the species are quite continuous. There 

 is no species found in the Soondreebun and Polynesia but not in 

 Malaya, aud not in any other intermediate area. I have only 

 tabulated the plants of the Kew Herbarium ; yet the instances 

 of a gap in distribution are very few and utterly unimportant : 

 thus the rare plant Paramignya longispina. Hook, f., was only 

 known from the Malay Peninsula ; Heunig has discovered it in 

 the Soondreebun, while there is no specimen in Kew frum the 

 intermediate coasts of Chittagong, Arracan, and Pegu. 



My eye lately fell on a paper on the Sparganium of Eussia. 

 One highly critical species is confined (at present) to Amurland 

 and New Zealand. I have no discontinuity of this kind in my 

 diagram : if I found any such, it would lead me to reconsider the 

 specific characters on which 1 had relied. 



(2) The numbers of species in common diminish regularly as 

 we proceed from the centre, following the law of frequency or 

 something approaching thereto : thus, of the 69 Soondreebun 

 plants considered, 53 are found in Burma, 45 in Malay Peninsula, 

 48 in Malaya, 32 in Tropical Australia, 30 in Tropical China, 31 

 in Polynesia. 



(3) We have always supposed, from a very general guess, that 

 the Soondreebun cbaracteri&tic Plora was especially that of 

 Malaya, Polynesia, &c., and that it was much less closely con- 

 nected with the African Flora. We find by the tabulation that 

 this general guess was pretty correct, but that we have over- 

 estimated the fact : we find that out of our 69 Soondreebun 

 plants, 49 extend to the Coromandel coast, 53 have been collected 

 in Burma; while 24 extend to the Malabar coast, and 18 to 

 Mascarenia. These numbers show that the Soondreebun can 

 hardly be described as the western extremity of the Polynesian 

 Flora, and that there is no strong line of west demarcation at the 

 Soondreebun : there is, in fact, a more strongly marked line at 

 Ceylon. 



(4) If we were to form a list of the certainly wild and well- 

 marked plants of Hampshire (as of the Soondreebun here), and 

 were then to form a diagram (like this Soondreebun diagram) re- 

 presenting their distribution in the maritime counties from Kent 



