WEST INDIAN DRIFT ON EUROPEAN SHORES 39 



be added here that Mr. Samler Brown in his Guide to Madeira 

 and the Canary Islands (8th edit., 1905) deals with many kindred 

 matters, but says nothing of the stranding of West Indian seeds. 



The Risks of Premature Generalisations on the Dispersal 

 of Seeds by the Great Oceanic Currents. — The discussion to 

 which this chapter has been devoted opens up a number of other 

 questions; and perhaps the one that will first present itself is that 

 connected with the path followed by the floating seed in its traverse 

 of the Atlantic. Without a fairly precise acquaintance with the 

 working of the currents in this direction it is hazardous to generalise 

 on the subject, and to indulge in a picturesque description of the 

 currents at work in distributing seeds. 



The floating seed can tell its own story, but in a very imperfect 

 fashion. It can tell us nothing of its route and often nothing of 

 the duration of its ocean traverse; and although we should be 

 usually right in assuming that a tropical seed found on European 

 beaches came from the West Indies, it would not follow that it grew 

 in that region. There would be possibilities that it came originally 

 from the shores of the Spanish Main, or from the estuary of the 

 Amazon, or even from the mouth of the Niger, before it came within 

 the influence of the Gulf Stream in the Florida Sea. Nor could we 

 read its history in its specific name, since the great majority of 

 tropical seeds transported by the currents belong to littoral and 

 estuarine plants common to both the African and the American 

 sides of the tropical Atlantic, and under such circumstances any 

 discrimination as to source would be hazardous. 



The need thus presents itself of looking elsewhere for evidence 

 to supply what is lacking in the testimony of the drifting seed, and 

 in our need we appeal in the following chapter to the evidence of 

 bottle-drift. This is all the more requisite since some of the state- 

 ments one reads concerning the agency of currents in dispersing seeds 

 require considerable qualifications and illustrate the necessity of 

 exact knowledge of the principles regulating the process. Thus in 

 the English form by Prof. Ains worth Davis of Pouchet's VUnivers 

 (1906, p. 394) Dr. Karl Muller in Les Merveilles du Monde Vegetal 

 is thus quoted : " The great current which springs from the eastern 

 coast of South America has been known to bear a flotilla of thirteen 

 species of plants from Brazil and Guiana to the shores of Congo 

 in Africa. . . . Another grand oceanic current, traversing an immense 

 space of the torrid zone, constantly transports fruits from the shores 

 of India, which its waves tumultuously scatter on the rocks of 

 Brazil." 



With regard to these currents it is not apparent what the writer 

 could have intended, since the great equatorial currents could only 

 carry materials from the Congo to Brazil, whilst there is no great 

 oceanic current that constantly transports Indian drift to Brazil. 

 It is true that a bottle has been known to reach the Brazilian shores 

 from off the coast of Natal, and that drift from the Indian Ocean 

 can at times find its way into the South Atlantic in a small branch 

 of the Agulhas Current that doubles the Cape, instead of being 



