80 PITTONIA. 
set about, by merry making men of that craft, with a circle of 
white skulls, their dark sockets looking seaward as if in con- 
templation of farther sunset shores, the whole array forming 
a lugubrious but unmistakable landmark. 
By reference to the appended list of species observed on 
San Miguel it will be seen that ferns are altogether wanting 
there, although Santa Cruz yielded twelve. 
Out of the hundred and twenty-one phanerogams a dozen 
are common old world weeds everywhere naturalized in Cali- 
fornia. Eleven are species indigenous on the continent but 
not credited to other islands. Five of the eleven, namely, 
Potentilla Anserina, Cressa Cretica, Jaumea carnosa and 
two species of Salicornia are plants which confine themselves 
to salt marshes ; thus their occurrence on San Miguel alone 
of all the islands is because none of the others has as much as 
a square rod of that kind of ground. The other six are Aplo- 
pappus ericoides, Troximon grandiflorum, Sidalcea malve- 
flora, Gilia micrantha, Plantago hirtella and Scirpus ripa- 
rius. These are plants of our northern coasts mainly, and are 
such as would reach San Miguel naturally, owing to the 
course of winds and currents, rather than the other islands. 
Each of these species is, however, rare in this new locality, a 
circumstance which indicates, as I suppose, that they formed 
no part of the old flora.of San Miguel but have landed there 
in recent times. 
The bulk of the present vegetation is made up of plants 
altogether insular. Twenty-four out of the hundred and 
twenty-one species are of this class, while the number of 
individuals is much more largely in its favor. The fol- 
lowing, in so far as we know, are endemic on San Miguel 
itself: Hschscholtzia maritima, Erysimum insulare, Astra- 
galus Miguelensis, CEnothera nitida, Galium Miguelense, | 
Cnicus ; Phacelia scabrella and Corethrogyne fila- 
ginifolia, var. robusta ; only seven or'eight, and yet quite 
an astonishing number of species to be confined to one small 
islet no farther removed than this one is from other lands ; 
and if to about five of these, namely, the first four plus the 
