E. W. Berry — Fossil Sea Bean from Venezuela. 313 



to this conjecture. Not all strand plants are cosmopoli- 

 tan and there is a certain amount of contrast between the 

 American and West African tropics on the one hand and 

 those of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans on the 

 other. Many factors are involved not the least important 

 of which is the age of the types. At least I judge this to 

 be the most important since of the forms common to the 

 two. areas Khizophora, Sophora and Canavalia have been 

 found in the Eocene around the old Gulf of Mexico and 

 now Entada turns up along the Miocene shore of the 

 Caribbean. The occurrence of the Nipa palm in the 

 Eocene of the new world points in the same direction. 



Guppy considers the sea bean absent along the east 

 coast of South America. Whether or not our information 

 on this point is complete or not I do not know but if is true 

 it is in accord with my conception of the line of travel in 

 the Tertiary which was from America eastward to West 

 Africa despite the fact that the present North and South 

 Equatorial currents would favor the reverse direction of 

 migration. 



Entada has not certainly been found fossil heretofore 

 except in the case of subfossil seeds of the existing sea 

 bean on the Scandinavian coast, which might well prove a 

 stumbling block to future paleobotanists and climatolo- 

 gists were they unacquainted with their origin and means 

 of transportation. tJnger long ago described two differ- 

 ent species of fossil pods and referred them to Entada. 

 These were Entada primogenitor from the Miocene of 

 Radoboj in Croatia and Entada polyphemi 2 from the 

 Oligocene of Sotzka in Styria. They are both large and 

 the second is suggestive of Entada, but as Schenk points 

 out at length, 3 they also resemble other leguminous 

 pods and are inconclusive although not entirely improb- 

 able. 



There can not be the slightest doubt regarding the bo- 

 tanical affinity of the present fossil since it agrees in every 

 detail with the existing species. It adds another to the 

 considerable list of plants of the sea drift that have been 

 discovered in recent years in the American Tertiary trop- 

 ical and subtropical floras. 



Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. 



1 Unger, F., Sylloge. Bd. 2, p. 36, pi. 11, fig. 22, 1862. 



2 Idem, fig. 23. 



3 Schenk, A., Palaeophytology, p. 702, 1890. 



