THE MASCAEENHAS. 41 



in winter, and most frequent between December and April, but especially to be 

 dreaded in February, when the waters are churned up, giving to the seas the 

 appearance of a boiling caldron. During the storm of February 26th, 1860, 

 many vessels foundered, and cargoes to the value of £120,000 were swallowed up 

 by the waves, while twenty-three thousand native huts were swept away by the 

 still more terrific gale of 1868. Occasionally huge blocks of coral are torn from 

 the reefs and borne by the raging waters far into the interior, looking as if hurled 

 across the land by some tremendous submarine explosion. 



Flora and Fauna. 



Owing to their oceanic origin the Mascarenhas have an independent flora and 

 fauna, differing not only from those of the Asiatic and African continents, but also 

 from those of Madagascar and neighbouring islands. It is no longer possible to 

 determine the exact nature of the local flora before the arrival of the first settlers, 

 as since that time most of the forests have been cleared and cultivated plants intro- 

 duced, while some three hundred wild species have supplanted the indigenous 

 forms. Except the citron, Réunion appears to possess no fruit-tree pecidiar to 

 itself. Nevertheless botanists still enumerate over five hundred endemic plants 

 in the Mascarenhas and Seychelles. Of the forms common to other regions, the 

 Asiatic are more numerous than those of African origin. Of twenty-two varieties 

 of the pandanus, these islands possess as many as twenty, and of these nine 

 are peculiar to Mauritius, four to Réunion, three to the Sej^chelles, and two to 

 Rodrigues. The large proportion of ferns and orchids imparts to the vegetation 

 of the Mascarenhas a distinct place among insular floras. 



Most naturalists admit that all the mammals at present found in the island — a 

 Madagascar lemurian and centetes, a wild cat, a hare, some rats and mice — have 

 been introduced by the colonists. Some lizards, snakes, and frogs also occur ; 

 while the land turtles, formerly so numerous that they " paved " the beach, have 

 been exterminated by the fishermen. The deer, still met in Mauritius but extinct 

 in Réunion, were introduced by the Portuguese, and efforts have recently been 

 made to acclimatise the ostrich. Strange to say, the islet of Ronde, about 16 

 miles north of Mauritius, forms a separate biological kingdom, possessing one 

 peculiar species of cabbage-palm, some lizards, two snakes, and relatively more 

 monocotjdedonous plants than any other region in the world. 



These islands were formerly' noted for their large wingless birds, such as the 

 dodo and the aphanapterix, the "solitary" {pezophaps solitaria), the giant water- 

 fowl larger than a man, a species of lori, as well as many others, the non-fossilised 

 remains of which have recently been discovered by Clarke in Mauritius. But a 

 few decades after the arrival of the Europeans all these helpless birds, apparently 

 dating from the Miocene epoch, had already disappeared, falling an easy prey to 

 the rats, dogs,, cats, and pigs of the settlers. Quite recently the alectorœnas lutidis- 

 sima, a species of pigeon, has become extinct in Mauritius, just as the aledorœnm 

 rodericana, another variety of the same genus, had already died out in Rodrigues. 



