76 PLANTS, SEEDS, AND CURRENTS 



Straits is stranded on the shores of Europe, that Dr. Schott (p. 13) 

 assumes the presence of water from the southern hemisphere in our 

 northern seas. It is true that no bottle from off the mouths of the 

 Amazon seems to have been found on the coast of Europe ; but we 

 have the record of a bottle, referred to on p. 59, that was dropped 

 into the Caribbean Sea about 100 miles from the south coast of 

 Jamaica in the direct track of the Main Equatorial Current and was 

 recovered on the Irish coast. The first part of the passage from the 

 coast of Brazil would be indicated by the track of a bottle that 

 reached the Cayman Islands from Ceara, north-west of Cape St. 

 Roque (Savage English, Kew Bull, 1913, p. 370). 



But the demonstration of this link between the Florida Straits 

 and the Amazon estuary may mean even more, since the Main 

 Equatorial Current before quitting the Gulf of Guinea would have 

 gathered drift from the West African coasts and from the estuaries 

 of the Niger and the Congo. It is therefore not unlikely that even 

 West African drift might find its way by this circuitous route to the 

 shores of Europe. The bottle-drift data indicate that if Amazon 

 drift can reach European waters in twenty months that from the 

 Congo would require two years. Reference has several times been 

 made to a bottle which was found on the Irish coast thirty-four 

 months after it had been thrown over to the westward of the Cape 

 Verde Islands, having crossed and recrossed the Atlantic in the 

 North Equatorial Current and in the Gulf Stream. But I possess 

 no bottle-drift data bearing directly on the possibility of drift being 

 carried from the Gulf of Guinea and the two great rivers of equatorial 

 West Africa to the coasts of Europe. There is, however, the ex- 

 tremely interesting observation of General Sabine, where casks of 

 palm oil from a ship wrecked on the borders of this gulf are stated 

 to have been drifted ashore in the following year at the extreme 

 north of Norway, and there is the case of a bottle thrown over from 

 the Lady Montague, two and a half leagues north-east of Ascension, 

 which was found afloat off the coast of Guernsey 295 days afterwards. 

 There are, however, serious difficulties connected with the first case, 

 and as regards the second it seems incredible that a bottle could 

 twice traverse the Atlantic, in equatorial and north temperate lati- 

 tudes, in less than ten months. Both of these exceptional cases 

 are dealt with in Notes 25 and 26 of the Appendix. 



The Balance of the Account between the Old and the 

 New World. — It is an error to place an equal value, as De Candolle 

 does in his Geographie Botanique (pp. 763-4, 1855), on the work of 

 the Gulf Stream and of the Equatorial Currents in transporting 

 seeds to the Old World and in carrying them to the New World in 

 a suitable condition for germination. He considers that the seed- 

 drift would be carried to the Gulf of Guinea from the tropics of the 

 New World in that portion of the Gulf Stream that bends south 

 past Europe and North Africa to the Canary Islands. There is no 

 support given to this view by the numerous bottle-drift data at my 

 disposal. All such drift, when it approaches the vicinity of the 

 Cape Verde Group, is deflected westward and is borne in the North 

 Equatorial Current to the West Indies. There is no approach to 



