194 PITTONIA. 
Catalogue will be prized in future years as a work which 
marked, in Ameriea, the opening of a new era in the litera- 
ture of our science. 
THE BOTANY or CEDROS ISLAND. 
Cedros Island, written Cerros' on the older maps, belongs 
to the Mexican Republic; and, although from an economic 
point of view nearly worthless, being uninhabited and unin- 
habitable, it is nevertheless the largest of the Mexican coast 
islands. Its location is about midway of the Mexican Terri- 
tory of Lower California, and some forty miles distant from 
‘the shore. It forms, together with the small island of Nativi- 
dad which intervenes between its southern extremity and the 
mainland, the western boundary of the large and beautiful 
and quiet Bay of Sebastian Viscaino, so named in worthy 
commemoration of the early Spanish navigator. 
The island is of an obscurely triangular outline, widening 
gradually from the narrow and sharp northern extremity to a 
breadth of about nine miles at the southern end, the whole 
length being more than twenty-one miles. It is of volcanic 
origin, rising sharply from the sea, with numerous peaks 
of whieh the highest has an altitude of a little less than 
4,000 feet. 
Lying as far down as the twenty-eighth degree of latitude, 
and therefore far away from the Pacific coast centers of com- 
mereial activity and scientific research, it nevertheless came 
to pass that the natural history of Cedros began to be known 
a Mu uu o m m. 
1- The cedars which grow on it—Cedros in Spanish— gave the island its 
name; but the softness of the d in that language, often scarcely audible 
to foreign ears, evidently led to its omission in the English speaking of 
He Anno, and so writers in English came naturaly to the erroneous 
