260 CHARLES DARWIN 



for 600 miles northward of Cape Horn, have a very similar 

 aspect. As a proof of the equable climate, even for 300 or 

 400 miles still further northward, I may mention that in 

 Chiloe (corresponding in latitude with the northern parts 

 of Spain) the peach seldom produces fruit, whilst straw- 

 berries and apples thrive to perfection. Even the crops of 

 barley and wheat 8 are often brought into the houses to be 

 dried and ripened. At Valdivia (in the same latitude of 

 40, with Madrid) grapes and fi^s ripen, but are not cpm- 

 mon; olives seldom ripen even partially, and oranges not at 

 all. These fruits, in corresponding latitudes in Europe, are 

 well known to succeed to perfection; and even in this con- 

 tinent, at the Rio Negro, under nearly the same parallel 

 with Valdivia, sweet potatoes (convolvulus) are cultivated; 

 and grapes, figs, olives, oranges, water and musk melons, 

 produce abundant fruit. Although the humid and equable 

 climate of Chiloe, and of the coast northward and south- 

 ward of it, is so unfavourable to our fruits, yet the native 

 forests, from lat. 45 to 38, almost rival in luxuriance those 

 of the glowing intertropical regions. Stately trees of many 

 kinds, with smooth and highly coloured barks, are loaded 

 by parasitical monocotyledonous plants; large and elegant 

 ferns are numerous, and arborescent grasses entwine the 

 trees into one entangled mass to the height of thirty or forty 

 feet above the ground. Palm-trees grow in lat 37 ; an arbor- 

 escent grass, very like a bamboo, in 40 ; and another closely 

 allied kind, of great length, but not erect, flourishes even as 

 far south as 45 S. 



An equable climate, evidently due to the large area of sea 

 compared with the land, seems to extend over the greater 

 part of the southern hemisphere ; and, as a consequence, the 

 vegetation partakes of a semi-tropical character. Tree-ferns 

 thrive luxuriantly in Van Diemen's Land (lat. 45), and I 

 measured one trunk no less than six feet in circumference. 

 An arborescent fern was found by Forster in New Zealand 

 in 46, where orchideous plants are parasitical on the trees. 

 In the Auckland Islands, ferns, according to Dr. Dieffen- 

 bach 10 have trunks so thick and high that they may be almost 



Agueros, Descrip. Hist, de la Prov. de Chiloe, 1791, p. 94. 

 10 See the German Translation of this Journal; and for the other facts. 

 Mr. Brown's Appendix to Flinders's Voyage. 



