MACLOSKIE: CHARACTER AND ORIGIN OF THE PATAGONIAN FLORA. 947 



they mostly prefer the Magellan channel, with all its windings, its fogs 

 and its rocks. To go eastwards by Cape Horn, even onwards to Aus- 

 tralia, is only to "run the easting down" where the chief risk is that the 

 waves may rush the ship too fast for safety. 



Proceeding northward from Cape Horn, along the eastern coast of 

 Fuegia, one comes to two groups of islands, Staaten Island, separated 

 from the main land by the Strait of Lemaire, 25 kilometers wide, and 

 richly wooded ; the other islands are the Falklands (known to the French 

 as the Malouines), directly east of the entrance to Magellan Strait, at a 

 distance of 500 kilometers. These islands have rocky heights, extensive 

 moorlands, and peat bogs, large freshwater pools and rivulets, and the 

 extraordinary phenomenon of "streams of stones" slowly .descending 

 from the hills, like petrified glaciers from their elevated breedingrplace. 

 The absence of trees from' the Falklands and the presence of some pecu- 

 liar plants, most famous being the "tussock-grass" (Poa flabellata), and 

 the "wiry-grass" (Deschampsiaantarctica z&&flexuosa} are characteristic; 

 also the Nassauma serpens, which sends leagues of its root down among 

 the rocks. The islands are also the home of forms which prove that they 

 have been the landing place, or the point of departure, for plants which 

 are common to peraustral America and the Australasian lands. 



Niederlein refers to the arid and stern, often very bleak aspect of the 

 vegetation of the eastern Patagonian plains ; for thousands of square leagues 

 there being nothing but dry grass, and loose sand mingled with salt ; and 

 the fierce storms come from the southern icy sea across the steppes. Rain 

 seldom falls, and the water is received into salty morasses. No brook 

 enters the few rivers which cross from the mountains in deep channels. 

 The vegetation consists of few stiff grasses, woody, and mostly glutinous 

 or thorny hairy bushes, and shrubs of 1-3 meters height, bare, stump-like, 

 apparently dead after losing their few leaves. Even during the growing 

 period the older branches are often leafless, and apparently lifeless. The 

 leaves may be small and caducous, or fleshy, or leathery, hard, or prickly, 

 or transformed into spines, and sometimes stripped off. Only a few of 

 the flowers are remarkable for beauty, or fragrance or size. 



On account of these vegetal affinities of distant lands, all the southern 

 hemisphere has been included by some authors in a single "Antarctic" 

 botanical region. Karl Reiche makes this one of the fifteen great floral 

 regions of the world, being characterized by forests of evergreen beeches, 



