THE STRAIT OF MAGELLAN. 441 



affinities. At first I could perceive no flowers, but on going 

 down on my hands and knees, and crawling over the ground 

 in this fashion, I after a time found flower-buds, and then 

 fully opened flowers, and last year's fruit. The plant is, I 

 believe, regarded by Dr. Hooker as an aberrant member of 

 the order Saxifragacew, forming, in his opinion, the type of 

 a new genus, which I hope will be described fully ere long. 

 A detailed account of it would be out of place in the present 

 narrative, and I shall therefore content myself with stating 

 that the corolla is formed of five white petals, that the ovary 

 is trilocular with axial placentation, and that the fruit is a 

 capsule opening by three valves. Later in the day we visited 

 several Fuegian camping-places at different parts of the har- 

 bour. The low beehive-shaped skeleton wigwams were in 

 general surrounded on three sides by Fuchsia bushes, which 

 formed an excellent shelter from the wind, and heaps of dead 

 shells (among which I found a single specimen of an old worn 

 Concholepas) and an abundant crop of nettles were, as usual, 

 to be seen in the vicinity. The sites of these wigwams could 

 almost invariably be readily recognised at a distance by the 

 bright green tint of the herbage, which contrasted remark- 

 ably with the more sombre hues of that around. At one 

 of these encampments I picked up a portion of the cranium 

 of a deer in a good state of preservation, and I also found 

 numerous plants of an elegantly cut fern (an Aspidium), not 

 met with by us before or since in any other locality. Two 

 distinct forms of it occurred, differing so conspicuously in the 

 cutting of the pinnae, that had I not found them growing 

 side by side, and connected by intermediate links, I should 

 certainly have attributed them to distinct species. I also 

 obtained very fine flowering specimens of Lepidothamnus on 

 this occasion. 



