12 H.G.SIMMONS. [SEC. ARCT. EXP.FRAM 



but of a somewhat less hard kind than in Castle Island, with less sili- 

 cate and more clay. 



However it would form still a very poor soil were it not inhabited 

 by rather many birds. There are more gulls than in Castle Island, 

 quite a colony of terns and also some eider-ducks. Some of the gulls' 

 nests are very old, forming small hillocks, built up of a mixture of 

 pebbles, bones of different animals, feathers, moss, dung of the birds etc. 

 Some of them are clothed with a dense vegetation of Cochlearia, 

 Catabrosa, Glyceria distans, and somewhere also Saxifraga groen- 

 landica. In the lower parts of the island the rock is covered with a 

 layer of pebbles, or here and there with clay. The debris, and partly 

 also the rocks, are more or less covered with lichens in places where 

 water trickles down from some small snowdrifts with green and blue- 

 green algae also, as for instance Phormidium sp. At the western end 

 there was a large snowdrift stretching inland from the ice foot, and as 

 a little rivulet that carried organic material from the breeding-places 

 Ho wed over it, there was developed a vegetation of different algae on 

 the snow, which appeared partly red, partly green. I have not yet had 

 time to examine the algae collected here. 



The number of species contained in the collection of mosses which 

 I brought together from the rocks, from among the pebbles, and espe- 

 cially from the moist depressions and irrigated places as well as from 

 the gulls' rookery, reaches 35 (BRYHN, Bryophyta, p. 251 253). Of 

 these, 3 are found neither in Castle Island nor at Cape Vera; 2 in the 

 former locality but not in the latter. The list of flowering plants 

 embraces the following species : - Saxifraga oppositifolia (somewhat 

 more abundant than in Castle Island), S. cernua, S. groenlandica with 

 f. flavescens (4010), Draba subcapitata, Cochlearia officinalis var. 

 groenlandica (the most abundant species), Papaver radicatum (chiefly 

 near the top), Glyceria distans var. vaginata (4011), G. angustata 

 (4012), Catabrosa algida (4009), Alopecurus alpinns. 



I think that the vegetation of the two small islands, Devil's Isle 

 and Castle Island, may prove to be of a certain interest. They show 

 a great recemblance one to the other, both being built up of the same 

 material, which also forms the adjacent coast of North Devon, and which 

 is little fitted for the development of vegetation ; both of them, for the 

 greater part, have risen above the surface of the sea at a rather late 

 period ; both are inhabited by numerous birds, as they are separated 



