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INTERESTS OF KERGUELEN'S LAND 79 



all thrive well on the Island, and would be no ordinary boon 

 to the whalers. The little Banunculus is the only acrid 

 plant I have found near the harbour, so I suppose it must 

 have been this that Cook's party ate for cress ; it appeared 

 to me anything but wholesome. 



Among the seaweeds many are doubtless edible ; on 

 one occasion I found our gunner seated on a rock with his 

 feet in the surf passing down what he called dulse ; it 

 certainly was eatable raw ; I need not add my friend was 

 a Scotchman. The Lichens are all much too tough to afford 

 any hopes of rivalling the Iceland Moss. Some of the Musci 

 might be used by the Laplanders as they do their own, as 

 swaddling clothes for their babies. 



Strange that this was an island in S. latitude corresponding 

 to that of Jersey in the northern hemisphere. 



To the last hour of his stay at Kerguelen's Land he was 

 absorbed in the strange interests of the place, and writing 

 from Tasmania, November 1840, with the prospect of visiting 

 another oceanic solitude, Campbell Island, he speaks of it as 



another edition of Kerguelen's Land, I suppose. I know 

 I shall be happy there, for I was sorry at leaving Christmas 

 Harbour ; by finding food for ^ the mind one may grow 

 attached to the most wretched spots on the globe, yet 

 hitherto I fear I have rather played with Botany than done 

 any good at it. 



The long stay at the Falkland Islands in 1842 gave time 

 for generalising upon the botanical material collected in the 

 South. The main lines of his thought begin to stand out 

 clearly in his letters of this date. To his father he writes on 

 November 25, 1842 : 



The Cryptogamiae are far more numerous. I am not 

 aware of having omitted any species of any Nat. Order 

 which came under my notice ; this perhaps prevented my 

 getting any better specimens of some Phaenogamic plants 

 that were in flower, but anybody can collect them, and no 

 botanists mil attend to the Cryptogamic. I am further 

 anxious to know the proportions that the Nat. Orders bear 

 to themselves at different Antarctic Longitudes and to 



