Miscellaneous. 335 
_ The intimate relationship traceable between the tertiary and 
Japanese floras in the numerous characteristic types common to 
both ; the issue of the ordinal and generic comparisons given above ; 
the larger proportion of ligneous species in the Japanese than in the 
tern American flora; and the number of types peculiar, at the 
present day, to Eastern America. and Eastern Asia, compared with 
the few restricted to Europe and America, the speaker contends, 
favour the view advanced by Professor Asa Gray in reference to 
plants, and by Mr. Darwin as to animals, viz., that the migration of 
forms to which is due the community of types in the Eastern States 
of North America and the miocene of Europe, took place to the 
north of the Pacific, an overland communication, it may be supposed, 
having existed during the tertiary time somewhere about Behring’s 
Straits or the line of the Aleutian Islands. This view is confirmed by 
the oceurrence of miocene vegetable remains in North-west America 
(including genera yet growing in Japan but lost to America), which 
prove, further, the temperature of these latitudes to have been at that 
time sufficiently high to have permitted their existence so far north. 
The evidence in favour of the ‘ Atlantis’ hypothesis might, more- 
over, be expected to have been more marked in the existing vegeta- 
tion of the Atlantic Islands than is the case. Professor Heer points 
out the genera Clethra, Bystropogon, Cedronella, and Oreodaphne 
as common to the Atlantic Islands and America. Japanese species, 
however, have been described of Clethra and Cedronella ; and Messrs. 
Webb and Berthelot limit Bystropogon to Atlantic-island species. 
Oreodaphne occurs in South Africa and adjacent islands. 
A connexion between these islands and Europe, at perhaps a late 
period of the tertiary, may be considered as highly probable from 
the predominance of Mediterranean forms in their flora. The few 
genera characteristic of the tertiary which they possess may have 
been derived during this connexion; but the hypothesis that a 
continent should have extended westward as far as America, the 
speaker considered the available botanical evidence did not in the 
least substantiate. 
MISCELLANEOUS. 
On the Reproduction of Red Coral. 
By M. pe Lacaze Durauiers. 
M. Lacaze Duruters having been appointed by the Government 
of Algeria to investigate the natural history of the Red Coral, with a 
view to the regulation of its fishery, passed nearly a year on the 
African coast of the Mediterranean, in order to study the reproduc- 
tion of that Zoophyte. Some of the results of his researches have 
recently been communicated to the Academy of Sciences. 
* He finds that the individual polypes of each colony are partly 
male and female and partly hermaphrodite, and that the individuals 
of one sex usually predominate over those of the other on particular 
branches—one branch consisting almost exclusively of male, and an- 
