BOTANY OF SAN MIGUEL. 81 
Phacelia, there be added the names of Eriogonum rubescens 
and Malacothrix incana which are otherwise reported from 
only a small bit of shore at the western extremity of Santa 
Cruz, and also Abronia villosa and a mesembrianthemum, the 
nine will comprise, I think, considerably more than two thirds 
of the present vegetation:of the island exclusive of the 
grasses. 
My catalogue is, I am bound to say, necessarily incomplete ` 
as regards the species and perhaps genera of the grasses 
But there is this marked peculiarity of San Miguel as com- 
pared with both the mainland and the adjacent islands, that 
its grass product consists, in the main, of perennial kinds. 
They were all past flowering and fruiting at the late date 
of my arrival, and consequently indeterminable, at see 
by any one not an agrostologist; but I judge that 
good and truly perennial pasturage covering the eastern third 
of the island to be constituted of two or three species of 
Elymus and Agropyrum, grasses which, on the mainland of 
California occur only somewhat sparingly and in the neighbor- 
hood of streams or in other moist places. These many acres 
of such pasturage have been the pride of the owner of San 
Miguel, whose horses, cows and sheep fare better on this cold 
bleak and desolate marine table-land and are much better 
secured against peril of starvation than are the flocks and 
herds on any of the larger and more fertile members of the 
archipelago where, as on the mainland, the grass species are 
annual and the crop yearly good or poor according to the 
winter rain fall. The prevalence of the perennial grasses 
here is not attributable to any greater annual fall of rain, for 
in this regard San Miguel is not favored above the adjacent 
islands, but to the almost continual fogs, a circumstance men- 
tioned at the beginning of this paper. The fact has likewise 
been adverted to that the sands are fast encroaching on these 
pasture stretches of San Miguel ; butin many places windward 
of these lines of encroachment I observed a peculiar looking 
grass-foliage peering above the surface of the older and more 
setled dunes which were otherwise destitute of vegetation, an 
