463 



species, cellular ami vascular ; a very largo proportion oi" these (more 

 than half?) being species identical with those of Britain ; and includ- 

 ing amongst them examples of all the (supposed) five distantly cre- 

 ated and distantly derived Floras, now differently distributed in 

 Britain ; as well as others which cannot be considered belonging to 

 any one of the five. 



About a hundred and fifty additional species of vascular plants 

 have been brought to this country from the Azore islands, since the 

 collections of Hochstetter and Guthnick were formed. A conside- 

 rable number of these still remain unrecorded from those islands, ex- 

 cept by their labels in herbaria ; but upwards of a hundred of them 

 were enumerated in Mr. Hewett Watson's list of his collection, made 

 in the same islands, in 1842. The ' Flora Azorica,' however, remains 

 the standard work on Azoric Botany, including the original descrip- 

 tions of the new and endemic species, with accurate figures of a score 

 of them. According to the census of Dr. Seubert, among the 400 

 species there are fifty which are peculiar to those small islands, only 

 twenty-three which are common to those isles with Madeira and Ca- 

 nary (one or both) but not known in Europe. Increased knowledge 

 of the Botany of the Azores, with the more complete series of Madei- 

 ran plants preserved in English herbaria, now lead to some changes 

 in these estimates. The number of species absolutely limited to the 

 Azores is rather less than stated by Seubert, while the number of 

 species common to them and Madeira requires to be taken at a higher 

 figure. Speaking in round numbers, we may say that four-fifths of all 

 the species now wild in the Azores, are wild also in Europe, from 

 which many of them have been doubtless carried to the Azores by the 

 early settlers. Of the remaining one-fifth, nearly the whole number 

 are peculiar to the Azores, or to the archipelago of Atlantic Islands, 

 which includes also Madeira and the Canaries. Some have emigrated 

 to the Azores from the continents of Africa and America. 



Among the few exceptions, one is striking. The elegant Lycopo- 

 dium cernuum, quite a tropical form of its genus, unknown in Madei- 

 ra and (as we remember) in the Canaries, reappears in the more 

 northern latitude of the Azores, where it grows only by the warm 

 springs in St. Michael's. Here is a fine fact for vestigians and 

 geologists, who explain the tropical character of our fossil Flora, in 

 boreal latitudes, by a supposed internal heat in the ground dining 

 long ante-human eras. In these same isles the arctic l^ycopodium 



