298 eyth6r einarsson 



Scandinavia. More than half of the Icelandic species are also found in Green- 

 land, and in the Faeroes the situation is about the same. Because many of 

 the north European species are found throughout the Arctic, a considerable 

 part of the Icelandic species are also found in Siberia, Spitsbergen, and 

 northern North America. The only endemic species of vascular plants in 

 Iceland, according to Gronlund, is Carex lyngbyei, and in addition there are 

 three varieties of more widely distributed species. 



Stromfelt (1884) mentions 371 species of vascular plants from Iceland, 

 Like Babington and Gronlund, he considered that only five of the Icelandic 

 species, or 1.5 per cent are not found in Scandinavia, while 35.7 per cent of 

 the species are not found in Greenland, among them some of the most 

 common Icelandic lowland plants; 39.5 per cent of the Icelandic species are not 

 found in the Faeroes, and that the character of the Icelandic flora, thus, is 

 almost entirely Scandinavian. 



In his statistical treatise on "The flora of Greenland, Iceland and the 

 Faeroes", Warming (1888) mentions 417 species of vascular plants from 

 Iceland and says that the Icelandic flora is a typical European one. He 

 divides the flora of these countries into 20 groups. He counts more than one- 

 third of the Icelandic plants, or 151 species in his Group 3, Temperate-zone 

 species; 70 belong to Group 2, Boreal-zone species; 64 to Group 1, Circum- 

 polar species; and 48 belong to his group 4, European-American species. 

 Three Icelandic species have a western distribution (not found in Europe), 

 whereas 74 have an eastern distribution (not found in America). 



During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Icelandic flora was 

 carefully investigated, mostly by Helgi Jonsson and Stefan Stefansson, and 

 many papers were published on the subject. Helgi Jonsson (1896) records 435 

 species of vascular plants from Iceland, but in a later paper (Jonsson 1905) 

 he sets the number at 360. In his first paper on the Icelandic flora, Stefan 

 Stefansson (1890) reports 423 species of vascular plants known there. His 

 Flora Islands (Flora of Iceland, 1901), a valuable manual firmly based on his 

 own investigations of the flora, however, contains only 359 species of vascular 

 plants, 10 of which belong to the genera Taraxacum and Hieracium. 



Thus, Jonsson and Stefansson are even more sceptical than Gronlund 

 regarding some of the species mentioned in the old plant lists and especially 

 in Babington's paper, but never found again — and perhaps not found at all — 

 in Iceland. 



In 1924, the second edition of Stefansson's Flora islands appeared, contain- 

 ing 363 species of vascular plants, five "species" of Taraxacum and 43 

 "species" of Hieracium excluded. Some few species, new to the Icelandic flora, 

 had been added; some of the excluded species from the old plant lists had 

 been rediscovered and some of the accidentally introduced species had been 

 naturalized since 1901. 



Molholm-Hansen (1930) divided the Icelandic vascular plants (375 species. 



