38 
and by the droppings of the sea-birds that make their homes in its 
branches. Some of the smaller islets have scarcely anything 
but the CZusia in their seed-plant flora, and, crowned with the 
dense polished dark-green foliage of this peculiar tree, they 
present a most curious and interesting appearance, especially 
when at ebb-tide the green crown seems to be lifted out of the 
water by a pedestal fifteen or twenty feet high of almost perpen- 
dicular bare rock. The islet shown in the photograph (Fic. 8) 
is one of the larger of its sort and while the C/usza is, I believe, 
the only tree or shrub represented there, several of the higher 
plants have gained a foothold about the base, notably a pendu- 
lous, creeping, and climbing Cereus, which is shown, rather in- 
distinctly, towards the right of the picture. 
We left Taboga Island on December 14 and returned to the 
city of Panama, or rather to Ancon, its Canal Zone suburb, 
where we remained for another week. e city, or most of it, is 
situated on a point of land, which is succeeded to the seaward by 
an extensive area of shallow water, so that at a good low tide 
G. 7) one can walk out almost half a mile from the massive 
old Spanish seawall, against which the waves break at high tide. 
The bottom is largely rock and there are numerous tide-pools 
and tidal runways, which a collector of algae might be pardoned 
for hoping to find teeming with the tropical treasures of his 
speciality, but such, unhappily, are conspicuous mostly by their 
absence. In occasional places the exposed littoral rocks in the 
lowest third or fourth show a good growth of Caloglossa, Bos- 
trychia, and Gelidium (?), and a little lower are a Raéfsia and 
three or four species of encrusting Corallinaceae and Squam- 
ariaceae. These, with a few blue-green algae, a few other more 
or less microscopic forms, and a Chaetomorpha in the higher lit- 
to al regions, appear to constitute, roughly speaking, the marine 
flora of the immediate surroundings of the city of Panama. 
Through the courtesy of Mr. George W. Miller, the manager of 
the Panama office of the Central and South American Telegraph 
Company, a small house on the water-front was placed at my 
service as a laboratory, but the poverty of the collecting field so 
far as the algae were concerned rendered it scarcely a necessity. 
