VEGETATION OF EDEN HARBOUR. 225 



were found with verj' tolerable fruit, and there were 

 even some remains of the flowers of Desfontainea 

 spinosa and Mitraria coccinea. The latter beautiful 

 shrub appears to have been hitherto known only from 

 Chiloe and the Chonos Archipelago. In those islands 

 it is described as a tall climber straggling among the 

 branches of trees. Here I found it somewhat stunted, 

 growing four or five feet high, with the habit of a small 

 fuchsia. Neither of these is a true antarctic species. 

 Like many Chilian plants, they are peculiar and much- 

 modified members of tribes whose chief home is in 

 tropical America. Everything else that I saw was 

 characteristically antarctic. Three small coniferous 

 trees peculiar to this region ; a large-flowered berberry, 

 with leaves like those of a holly, growing six or eight 

 feet high, still showing remains of the flower ; and 

 two species of Pernettya, with berries like those of a 

 bilberry, and which replace our Vaccinia in the 

 southern hemisphere, were among the new forms 

 that greeted me. 



A few minutes' stumbling over fallen timber brought 

 us to the edge of the forest, and it was soon seen that, 

 even if time allowed, it would be no easy matter to 

 penetrate into it. The chief and only large tree was 

 the evergreen beech {Fagus betuloides of botanists). 

 This has a thick trunk, commonly three or four feet 

 in diameter, but nowhere, I believe, attains any great 

 height. Forty feet appeared to me the outside limit 

 attained by any that I saw here or elsewhere. But 

 perhaps the most striking, and to me unexpected, 

 feature in the vegetation was the abundance and 

 luxuriance of the ferns that inhabit these coasts. From 



Q 



