Over a South Atlantic Continent 435 



peopled with land plants from South America, by means of 

 intermediate tracts of land that have now disappeared; in 

 other words that these islands constitute the wrecks of either 

 an ancient continent, or an archipelago which formerly ex- 

 tended further westwards, and that their present vegetation 

 consists of the waifs and strays of a mainly Fuegian flora, 

 together with a few survivals of an endemic one." 



Then speaking of Amsterdam and St. Pauls Islands to 

 the N. E. of Kerguelen and almost in line between the tip 

 of Africa and the S. Australian coast he wrote : "their 

 scanty vegetation is on the whole more temperate than 

 antarctic, and approximates to that of S. Africa, in contain- 

 ing such genera as Phylica, Spartina, and Danthonia." And 

 of Tristan da Cunha group, between S. Africa and Fuegia 

 he remarked "Their flora is essentially Fuegian, with an 

 admixture of Cape genera, but with none of those character- 

 istics of Kerguelen Island." 



The gradual and successive publication of Hooker's 

 "Flora Tasmanica" {26/), of his "Flora Zeylanica" (268) 

 and of Bentham's "Flora Australiensis" further revealed 

 in striking manner, that not only was there a specific or 

 generic identity between many plants of these three areas, 

 but also that between S. Patagonia, Fuegia, the Falkland 

 Islands, Tristan da Cunha, Kerguelen Island, New Zealand, 

 Tasmania, and S. or S. E. Australia, there was much in com- 

 mon. And for reasons that will appear later the writer 

 would emphasize that S. or S. E. Australia seems to have 

 been the important connecting region with Tasmania, and 

 earlier — though for a short time geologically — with N. 

 Zealand. 



Hooker's study "On the Flora of Australia" in his 

 Flora of Tasmania, and the recent exhaustive study by 

 Cockayne of the New Zealand flora in relation to those of 

 southern lands, that forms the fourteenth volume of "Die 

 Vegetation der Erde," both emphasize our present conten- 

 tion. So many specific resemblances also between N. Zea- 

 land and the Chatham, Auckland, Campbell-Macquarie isles 

 can be traced, that we are forced to accept the continuity of 

 all of these with each other and the main masses, at some not 

 very remote past period. For the view that ocean currents, 



