viii LITTORAL PLANTS AND CURRENTS OF THE PACIFIC 65 



investigator, whether an anthropologist, a zoologist, or a botanist, 

 to find his facts at variance with the course of the prevailing 

 currents. Man, animals, and plants have entered the Pacific from 

 the west, whilst the most available currents are from the east ; and 

 one may be perhaps permitted the solecism that the Pacific islands 

 have apparently been stocked with their shore-plants, with their 

 aborigines, and with much of their fauna by currents running in the 

 wrong direction. These Pacific islands could only have had a direct 

 communication with the Old World, from which they have mainly 

 derived their shore-plants, by the currents ; but since both the 

 aborigines and the plants have forced their way across the ocean 

 to the Tahitian region in the teeth of the regular currents, 

 indicated as such in the chart, we are compelled to assume that 

 they have availed themselves either of the Equatorial Counter- 

 Current or of the occasional easterly drift currents that mark the 

 prevalence of westerly winds during the short season of the year 

 when the easterly trade-winds do not prevail. 



The Equatorial Counter-Current hypothesis would involve a 

 preliminary crossing of the whole breadth of the Pacific Ocean, 

 that is to say, a voyage of some 8,000 miles, before the drifting 

 seed doubled back to the Polynesian Islands. The other view is a 

 much more probable one, as is sufficiently indicated by the follow- 

 ing extract from the " Admiralty Sailing Directions for the Pacific 

 Islands" (II., p. 25, 1900) . . . " In the western part of the Pacific 

 these trades . . . are frequently interrupted by winds which blow 

 from west or north-west, especially during the months of January, 

 February, and March, when the north-west monsoon of the Indian 

 Ocean extends out in the Pacific as far as the Samoa Islands." In 

 various works on this region one may find reference to canoes 

 blown off the shore during this season and carried some hundreds of 

 miles to the eastward. A ship can then sometimes sail with a fair 

 wind from the southern end of the Solomon Group to the Fijis ; 

 and as we learn from Mariner, the crocodile may be at such times 

 carried away from the Solomon Islands and stranded in Fiji. 

 Mr. Hedley, in his exceedingly interesting paper on a zoo- 

 geographic scheme for the mid-Pacific (Proc. Linn. Soc. N.S.W., 

 1899), gives many details of this nature; but there is no space to 

 deal further with the matter here. 



After all, the botanist must take his cue from the drifting seed 

 and the distribution of the plant He finds the seed floating in 

 the open sea as well as stranded on the beach. He then discovers 

 the plant growing on the beaches, and by experiment he tests the 



VOL. II F 



