BOTANY OF SAN MIGUEL. 77 
The location of San Miguel is peculiar, necessarily affect- 
ing it with a climate considerably unlike that of the neighbor- 
ing islands. 
The most prominent feature of the whole Californian coast 
line is the promontory known as Point Conception. Above it 
the trend of the shores is north and south, below it east and 
west, and it is the point of separation between two quite dis- 
tinct climatic regions on both land and sea. It wards off from 
both the continental shore and from the six principal islands, 
the force of the northwest winds and swell. 
San Miguel alone, lying not at all to the sheltered eastward 
of this promontory, but directly to the southward and only 
thirty miles distant from it, is unprotected by it. It receives, 
therefore, the full force of the northwest winds, and that per- 
haps accelerated by their natural tendency to be drawn into 
the Santa Barbara Channel, of which it forms the western ex- 
tremity of the seaward wall. Its condition is one of per- 
petually wind-swept and wave-beaten exposure. 
We should not expect such an island to furnish an arboreal 
vegetation. Two stunted specimens of Heteromeles arbuti- 
folia, neither of them more than ten feet high, exist in a shel- 
tered spot near the head of a small canon at the eastern end, 
while near the western extremity, in an open grassy valley 
looking southward there is a group of some thirty small trees 
of that interesting, peculiarly insular species, Lavatera assur- 
gentiflora, a handsome shrub fast verging toward extinction 
on the few known insular localities, but one which will sur- 
vive in cultivation where it has always been quite common 
since the earliest times of Californian colonization. As it sur- 
vives in this particular locality upon San Miguel it bears 
quite a different aspect from that of the shrub known in culti- 
vation. On my first beholding the trees I questioned whether 
they were not of a different species even... The branches 
seemed much stouter, the leaves several larger, the 
corollas of a deeper color, and the stellate pubescence of the 
pedicels and involucres a good deal more pronounced and 
conspicuous. But a slender form not to be distinguished 
