282 COSMOS. 



appear to exhibit no tendency whatever to occur associated 

 lofrether. We have so accustomed ourselves, althouofh erro- 

 neously, to regard Conifera3 as a northern form, that I experi- 

 enced a feehng of surprise when, in ascending from the shores 

 of the South Pacific toward Chilpansingo and the elevated 

 valleys of Mexico, between the Venta de la Moxonera and the 

 Alto de los Caxones, 4000 feet above the level of the sea, I 

 rode a whole day through a dense wood of Pinus occidentalis, 

 where I observed that these trees, which are so similar to the 

 Weymouth pine, were associated with fan palms* {Cori/pha 

 dulcis), swarming v/ith brightly-colored parrots. South Amer- 

 ica has oaks, but not a single species of pine ; and the first 

 time that I again saw the familiar form of a fir-tree, it was 

 thus associated with the strange appearance of the fan palm.f 

 Christopher Columbus, in his first voyage of discovery, saw 

 Coniferaj and palms growing together on the northeastern ex- 

 tremity of the island of Cuba, likewise within the tropics, and 

 scarcely above the level of the sea. This acute observer, 

 whom nothing escaped, mentions the fact in his journal as a 

 remarkable circumstance, and his friend Anghiera, the secre- 

 tary of Ferdinand the Catholic, remarks with astonishment 

 " that jKdmeta and inneta are found associated together in 

 the newly-discovered land." It is a matter of much import- 

 ance to geology to compare the present distribution of plants 

 over the earth's surface w4th that exhibited in the fossil floras 

 of the primitive world. The temperate zone of the southern 

 hemisphere, which is so rich in seas and islands, and v/here 



* This corypha is the snyate (in Aztec, zoyall')'o" the Palma dulce of 

 the natives. See Huiuboklt auJ Bonplaiid. Synopt^ls Plant, ^^quinoct. 

 Oihis Novi, t. i., p. 302. Professor Buschmaiin, who is profoundly ac- 

 quaiuted with the American languages, remarks, that the Palma soy ate 

 is so named in Yepe's Vocabulario de la Lengua Othomi, and that the 

 Aztec word zoyatl (Molina, Vocabulario en Lengua Mexicana y Castel- 

 lana, p. 25) recurs in uames of places, such as Zoyatitlan and Zoya- 

 pauco, near Chiapa. 



t Near Baracoa and Cayos de Moya. See the Admiral's journal of 

 the 2.5th and 27th of November, 1492, and Humboldt, Examen Critique 

 de V Hist, de la Giographie du Nouveau Continent, t. ii., p. 252, and t. 

 iii., p. 23. Columbus, who invariably paid the most remarkable atten- 

 tion to all natural objects, v/as the first to observe the ditference be- 

 tween Podocarpus and Pinus. " I find," said he, " en la tierra aspera 

 del Cibao pinos que no llevan pinas (fir cones), pero portal orden com- 

 puestos por naturaleza, que (los frutos) pareceu azeytimas del Axarafe 

 de Sevilla." The great botanist, Richard, when he published his ex- 

 cellent Memoir on Cycade;Te and Conifene, little imagined that before 

 the time of L'Heritier, and even before the end of the fifteenth cen- 

 tury, a navigator had separated Podocarjyns from the Abietineoe. 



