WEST INDIAN DRIFT ON EUROPEAN SHORES 35 



who wrote the preface of his book on these islands in 1670, has been 

 already mentioned in connection with the drift seeds. It was, 

 however, with those of Entada scandens as found on the Faroe 

 beaches that he was especially concerned, and from his description 

 of them there can be no doubt as to their specific identity. 



In 1817 H. C. Lyngbye, a Danish algologist, visited the Faroes, 

 and in his Tentamen Hydrophytologiae Danicce of 1819 he remarks 

 (p. 60) that he picked up on the shores seeds of Mimosa scandentis 

 (Entada scandens), Dolichos mentis {Mucuna urens), and Guilandina 

 bonducella. In recent years Ostenfeld and Borgesen have again 

 directed attention to the West Indian seeds and fruits washed up 

 on these islands, and they mention those of Cocos, Guilandina, and 

 Entada scandens as coming under their notice {Botany of the Faeroes, 

 pp. 116, 812 : Copenhagen, 1901-8). 



Iceland and Greenland. — Seeds and fruits and drift-wood 

 from the New World are stranded on the shores of Iceland and Green- 

 land, as we learn from the Danish navigator, Admiral von Lowenorn 

 (1786), and from Barrow (1817), Sartorius von Waltershausen (1847), 

 Irminger (1854), and others. In his Physical Geography (1873, 

 p. 206) Laughton quotes from the report of the United Coast Survey 

 for 1860, to the effect that drift from the West Indian islands is 

 stranded in very considerable quantities on the south coast of 

 Iceland, where, " on the beach under Snaefell, trees with their 

 roots, and scraps of bark, logs of mahogany, and seeds which grow 

 in Jamaica at the nearest, roll in the surf." We learn from Irminger 

 (Zeitsch. f. Allg. Erdk., III., 187-90, 1854) that " many kinds of 

 Mimosas (t. e. seeds) are to be found on the coasts of Norway, Faroes, 

 Iceland, and Greenland, and also drift-wood." Von Waltershausen 

 in his work on the physical geography of Iceland (p. 347) refers to, 

 without naming, the tropical seeds and fruits thrown up with much 

 drift-timber on the coasts. With respect to Greenland Laughton 

 (p. 249) quotes Irminger to the effect that " beans of Mexican growth 

 are often washed up on the Greenland shores " ; and Kohl observes 

 (p. 160) that in the southern Danish settlements of Greenland on 

 the shores of Davis Strait every one knows the seeds of Entada 

 scandens, which are often cast up by the waves. 



The Scandinavian Coasts. — The West Indian drift thrown up 

 on the Norwegian coast has been several times mentioned in previous 

 pages. Claussen and Worm in the seventeenth century and many 

 others in the eighteenth century, such as Gunnerus, Pontoppidan, 

 Strom, Tonning, etc., interested themselves in the matter. In the 

 early part of the nineteenth century Wahlenberg, the Swedish 

 naturalist, in his Flora Lapponica (1812, p. 506) referred to the seeds 

 of Mimosa scandentis {Entada scandens) and Dolichos urentis {Mucuna 

 urens) as washed up on the north and north-west coasts of Norway. 

 A few years after, A. de Capell Brooke in the account in his Travels 

 through Sweden, Norway, and Finmark to the North Cape in 1820 

 (pp. 295, 317, 318) alluded to the drift from the New World cast up 

 on the Norwegian coasts. On the Tromsoe and Rost coasts much 

 timber was found, including baulks of Honduras mahogany. Seeds 

 of Entada scandens are (he says) thrown up after great storms. 



