170 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



considerable part of its scanty flora, are common to North 

 America and Europe, enormously remote as these areas 

 in opposite hemispheres are from each other. On the 

 lofty mountains of equatorial America a liost of peculiar 

 species belonging to European genera occur. On the 

 Organ Mountains of Brazil, some few temperate Euro- 

 pean, some Antarctic, and some Andean genera were 

 found by Gardner, which do not exist in the low inter- 

 vening hot countries. On the Silla of Caracas, the 

 illustrious Humboldt long ago found species belonging 

 to genera characteristic of the Cordillera. 



In Africa, several forms characteristic of Europe, and 

 some few representatives of the flora of the Cape of Good 

 Hope, occur on the mountains of Abyssinia. At the Cape 

 of Good Hope a very few European species, believed not 

 to have been introduced by man, and on the mountains 

 several representative European forms are found, which 

 have not been discovered in the intertropical parts of 

 Africa. Dr. Hooker has also lately shown that several 

 of the plants living on the upper parts of the lofty island 

 of Fernando Po and on the neighboring Cameroon Moan- 

 tains, in the Gulf of Guinea, are closely related to those 

 on the mountains of Abyssinia, and likewise to those of 

 temperate Europe. It now also appears, as I hear from 

 Dr. Hooker, that some of these same temperate plants 

 have been discovered by the Rev. R. T. Lowe on the 

 mountains of the Cape de Verde Islands. This exten- 

 sion of the same temperate forms, almost under the 

 equator, across the whole continent of Africa and to 

 the mountains of the Cape de Verde Archipelago, is one 

 of the most astonishing facts ever recorded in the 

 distribution of plants. 



