40 PLANTS, SEEDS, AND CURRENTS 



deflected eastward with the main stream; but it would certainly 

 be erroneous to speak of a grand oceanic current establishing constant 

 communication between India and Brazil. On a later page attention 

 is called to a serious blunder by which a bottle is made to reach 

 India from the tropical Atlantic instead of from the mouth of the 

 Red Sea, through a confusion between east and west longitude. In 

 this case fortunately the published record itself supplied the refuta- 

 tion; but this would not always be possible, especially in cases 

 where the supposed fact is quoted without the data. 



Transport of Mahogany Logs to the Coasts of Greenland, 

 Iceland, and the North- West of Europe . — It is to be expected 

 that seed-drift from the tropics of the New World would be some- 

 times accompanied by trunks of trees from the same region. Gum- 

 precht (p. 430) mentions that Lowenorn, the Danish admiral, found 

 logs of mahogany in 1786 on the east coast of Greenland; and he 

 adds that trunks of the same tree are thrown up on the west coast 

 near the island of Disco. In the last case the wood was in such good 

 condition that the Danish governor had a table made of it. I have 

 already referred to Laughton's quotation from the report of the 

 United States Coast Survey for 1860 that mahogany logs are rolled 

 in on the coast of Iceland. Lyngbye avers in his Tentamen Hydro- 

 phytologice Danicce, 1819, that he saw on the Faroe Islands a portion 

 of a canoe made of mahogany. Gumprecht (p. 426) and Kohl (p. 159) 

 refer to Irminger's observation of masses of drift-wood on the west 

 side of the Faroe Islands. Drift-timber is also cast ashore on the 

 Shetland Islands^which may hail from the tropics of the New World. 

 Mr. Fox sent me a piece of cedar( ?) which was chopped from a baulk 

 about twenty-five feet long. It was honeycombed by the borings 

 of the Teredo, and was stranded on the west coast. We learn from 

 De Capell Brooke (p. 295) that much timber is beached on the 

 Norwegian sea border in the Tromsoe district and on Rost, and he 

 particularises Honduras mahogany. One may note in this connection 

 Pennant's statement that " part of the mast of the Tilbury man-of- 

 war, burnt at Jamaica, was taken up on the Western Coast of 

 Scotland " (A Voyage to the Hebrides in 1772). 



Living Turtles carried by the Gulf Stream to the 

 Hebrides, the Orkneys, and the Shetlands. — This matter has 

 already been incidentally alluded to. Pennant in his Voyage to 

 the Hebrides in 1772 observes that " American tortoises, or turtle, 

 have more than once been taken alive on these coasts, tempest- 

 driven from their warm seas." Necker de Saussure in his paper in 

 the Bibliothique Britannique (1809), as quoted by Gumprecht (p. 416), 

 also mentions the stranding of turtles in connection with his sojourn 

 in this group. Mr. Peel in his book Wild Sport in the Outer Hebrides, 

 1901 (p. 3), tells us that young turtles together with West Indian 

 seed-drift are washed up on the shores of those islands. The Rev. 

 James Wallace, writing of the Orkney Islands at the close of the 

 seventeenth century, states that " sometimes they find living Tor- 

 toises on the shore " (1883 edition, p. 17). Some particulars of the 

 discovery of one of these turtles in the Shetlands are given by the 

 Rev. John Brand in his Brief Description of Orkney, Zetland, etc." 



