CHAPTER III 



THE CURRENTS OF THE ATLANTIC AND THE TRACKS OF DRIFTING 

 SEEDS AS ILLUSTRATED BY BOTTLE-DRIFT 



As indicative of the path followed by the drifting seed in its 

 passage across the Atlantic and of the time occupied in the ocean 

 traverse, the track of the drifting bottle offers very valuable data. 

 But it may be at once stated that there is no intention of dealing 

 here with all the materials which have accumulated in recent years 

 with reference to this subject. They are merely sampled in these 

 pages with the special object of throwing light on the interchange 

 of seed-drift between the Old and the New World. Notwithstanding 

 these limitations, the materials are quite as much as I can handle; 

 and any extension of the inquiry would result in the opening up of 

 the whole subject of bottle-drift, which would lead me far beyond 

 the limits set for this discussion. 



One of the earliest to make a collection of bottle-drift data was 

 H. Berghaus, who, in 1837, in the first volume of his Allgemeinen 

 Lander und Volkerkunde, published a list of twenty-one bottle-drifts, 

 and laid down in a chart in his Physikalischen Atlas several interest- 

 ing examples. I have not had access to these works, and am 

 indebted to Schott for the reference. Shortly afterwards a chart of 

 bottle-drifts constructed by Daussy, a Frenchman, is stated to have 

 been published; but I have not been able to find it. It is men- 

 tioned by Kohl in his Geschichte des Golfstromes (1868); but the 

 author's name is given as Dayssy, and one is referred for particulars 

 to Nouvelles Annales des Voyages (tome lxxxii., Paris, 1839), where 

 one finds only a brief notice of the results obtained. Schott (p. 2) 

 alludes to the missing chart, but he merely quotes Kohl. After 

 some search I found in Comptes Rendus (tome viii., p. 81, 1839) a 

 short paper of two and a half pages by M. Daussy, entitled " Sur les 

 observations de courants faites au moyen de bouteilles jetees a la 

 mer." He states that he had utilised ninety-seven bottle-drift 

 observations in his table and chart, which, however, do not accom- 

 pany his paper. Probably they lie among the unpublished records 

 of the Academie des Sciences of Paris. 



Major Rennell, in his Investigation of the Currents of the Atlantic 

 Ocean (1832), deals with the subject, and especially with the bottle- 

 drift from high northern latitudes, many interesting examples being 

 given. In 1852 Commander Becher published in the Nautical 

 Magazine, with charts, the data for about 180 bottle-drifts in the 

 North Atlantic, two-thirds of which had been previously published 



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