128 THE DISPERSAL OF SHELLS. 



etc., and on the shores of Florida, large numbers of 

 stranded trees, some submerged all but a few branches, 

 others at the tide line, and others thrown high and 

 dry by storms out of the reach of the sea at ordinary 

 times. ^ Dr. Alford Nicholls, of Dominica, when in 

 Tobago in 1891, saw large trunks of trees stranded 

 along the coast ; they had evidently come from the 

 Orinoco, and many of them had the bark and some 

 of the branches still attached. In the Radack Archi- 

 pelago, situate in the western part of the Pacific, as 

 mentioned in the Beagle Jo2ir7ial, palms and bamboos, 

 from somewhere in the torrid zone, and trunks of 

 northern firs, are known to have been washed on shore, 

 the latter, it is remarked, having necessarily come from 

 an immense distance. Drift-wood, bamboos, and canes, 

 according to Captain CoUnett, are often washed on the 

 south-eastern shores of the islands of the Galapagos 

 Archipelago. At the Keeling or Cocos Islands, in the 

 Indian Ocean, trunks of the sago-palm, and large masses 

 of Java-teak and yellow-wood, the blue gum-wood of 

 New Holland, and immense trees of red and white cedar, 

 etc., are said to have been washed up ; fishing-canoes, 

 also, apparently from Java, have come ashore at times. ^ 

 A South Sea islander's canoe, Mr. Musson tells me, was 

 once thrown up on Curtis Island, Queensland. Vast 



' C. T. Simpson, " Conchologists' Exchange," ii. (1887), p. 38. 



^ Darwin's Beagle Journal, ed. 2, 1845, PP- 39^ and 454-5, 

 quoting Chamisso, on the Radack Archipelago ; Collnett, on 

 the Galapagos group : and Keating (" Holman's Travels "), on the 

 Keeling or Cocos Islands. 



