78 THE WOKLD OF LIFE 



fore, in an area considerably less than that of the Cape Pen- 

 insula, the species are actually more numerous, and this was 

 evidently a new and astonishing fact to one of the greatest of 

 our living botanists. 



But the somewhat larger island of Singapore shows us that 

 this amount of productiveness is quite normal; for though it is 

 206 square miles in extent, it is almost flat, the greatest eleva- 

 tion being only a few hundred feet. A large part of the sur- 

 face is occupied by the town and suburbs, while the original 

 forest that covered it has been almost all destroved. Yet Mr. 

 Ridley finds it to have recently contained 1740 species, and 

 when the town was founded and the forest untouched, it almost 

 certainly had 2000 or even more. 



We have seen also that Lagoa Santa in South Brazil, 

 2700 feet above sea-level, with a much smaller area than 

 Penang, and a much less favourable climate, has one-third 

 more species, mainly collected by one enthusiastic botanist 

 during three years' work in this limited district. Here are no 

 mountains, the whole country being an undulating plateau, 

 while for six months there is so little rain that the trees 

 almost all lose their leaves. The aridity causes the trees to 

 be mostly stunted and unshapely; the leaves are clothed on 

 one or both surfaces with felt or dense hairs; and the stems 

 of herbaceous plants are often swollen into thick tubers 

 either underground or just above it. There is thus a mani- 

 fest struggle for existence ajrainst the summer drought with 

 intense sun-heat, and it would hardly be imagined that under 

 such conditions the number of species would equal or exceed 

 that of some of the most luxuriant parts of the tropics. 



I will now pass on to a consideration of the two last 

 items in the table of small tropical floras, which are more 

 instructive and even amazing than any I have met with in 

 the course of this inquiry. "\^^ien I was in Java about fifty 

 years ago I ascended the celebrated mountains Gede and 

 Pangerango, the former an active, and the latter, much the 

 higher, an extinct volcano. The two, however, form one 



