I 



PEOBLEMS OF DISTEIBUTION 75 



in the Western Highlands for pasturage ; to both of which 

 he makes constant reference, ahke scientific and practical. 

 He sends five sets of his St. Helena specimens home for various 

 recipients ; he takes some 300 specimens away with him from 

 the Cape on his first short visit there (March 17- April 6, 1840) 

 for examination at sea. 



By the time he has visited Kerguelen's Land (May 12- 

 July 20, 1840) his researches begin to take definite shape, both 

 in subject and in outlook, foreshadowing what was to appear 

 in his Flora Antarctica. Here emerges his serious interest 

 in the problems of distribution thrust upon him ever more 

 forcibly by the plants, living and fossil, so far removed from 

 any parent continent, and by the nature of Antarctic vegeta- 

 tion in general. He found the Kerguelen flora in form peculiarly 

 S. American, with some plants common to the Auckland 

 group and more to the Falklands. Later in the voyage he is 

 enabled to write under date November 25, 1842, * My regions 

 are different both in climate and forms from any other.' At 

 Kerguelen's Land above all, his favourite cryptogams, so much 

 less known than the flowering plants, and here relatively 

 abundant, invited his study. * You direct my attention,' he 

 writes to his father (September 7, 1840), * particularly to 

 Cryptogamia ; believe me that I have at Kerguelen's Land 

 strained every nerve to add to its scanty Flora in that 

 particular.' 



The Journal contains a very full description of this lonely, 

 rugged, storm-swept island, for 



though two months there, to the last day I went botanising, 

 and as far as I know I have left no hole unexamined or stone 

 unturned. . . . You cannot conceive the dehght which the 

 new discoveries afforded as they slowly revealed themselves, 

 though in many cases it was all I could do to collect from 

 the frozen ground as much as would serve to identify a 

 species. 



Indeed the very first day he landed, 



arriving on board, I found that I had ascertained the existence 

 of at least thirty species of plants in one day, and within 



