PREFACE 



With the exception of the section on the Azores, this work 

 was practically completed before the war began; and it is now 

 presented very much as it was written in the pre-war period. Un- 

 fortunately I greatly under-rated the task involved in the pro- 

 duction of the fair copy; and for this reason, as well as through 

 sickness and other causes, there has been considerable delay in its 

 preparation for the press. 



Associated with my observations on seeds and fruits, the results 

 of which were published in 1912 under the title of Studies in Seeds 

 and Fruits, the work embodied in these pages represents about 

 ten years of my life. The two winters of 1906-8 were spent in 

 Jamaica, that of 1908-9 mainly in Grenada but also in Tobago 

 and Trinidad, and that of 1910-11 in the Turks Islands. Subse- 

 quently two sojourns were made in the Azores, the first from the 

 middle of February to the end of April 1913, and the second from 

 the middle of June to the middle of August 1914. 



The great lesson that I have learned from the numerous difficult 

 distribution-problems presented in the West Indian region, is that 

 one can no longer fight shy of accepting in principle the conclusions 

 relating to past changes in the arrangement of land and water in 

 the Caribbean area, which have long been formulated by English 

 and American geologists and zoologists. The witness of the living 

 plant is often quite as insistent as the testimony of the rocks. Yet, 

 although the original holders of such views stood more or less alone 

 in their advocacy of them forty or fifty years ago, some of them, 

 like Mr. Lechmere Guppy, who died recently at Port-of- Spain, 

 lived to see their final justification. 



The inclusion of the Azores within my field of investigation 

 arose from a desire to come in contact with some of the problems 

 presented by the floras of the Atlantic Islands. In the previous 

 decade, 1896-1906, I had been brought face to face with problems 

 offered by the islands of the Pacific. Polynesia and the history 

 of its plant-stocking had occupied much of my thoughts during a 

 long period, and I turned to Macaronesia with the hope that as 

 typified in the Azores this region might bring me once again under 

 the spell cast by the problems of oceanic distribution. Yet the 

 outlook was at first far from encouraging, and it was suggested to 

 me that it was scarcely worth while to take up the study of islands, 

 concerning which we had long known all that was worth knowing. 

 However, a re-perusal of Hooker's famous lecture on insular floras 

 whetted my curiosity, and I soon found that the Macaronesian 



