394 PLANTS, SEEDS, AND CURRENTS 



trees, on its first discovery, inhabited a high belt of country extending 

 east and west along the island." But very large trunks of other 

 existing species of trees are also found buried in the volcanic tuffs 

 of this island. Thus Walker (pp. 219, 220) refers to trunks of the 

 Tree-Heath (Erica azorica) and of the Faya (Myrica faya) of giant 

 proportions, which have been exposed in a state of lignite (?) in the 

 ravines of San Miguel. So again, Carew Hunt, for years British 

 Consul in the Azores and the principal source of Watson's later 

 collections, when writing of San Miguel in the Journal of the Royal 

 Geographical Society for 1845, states that there had been found in 

 the tuffs trunks of the Faya, Juniper, and Tree-Heath, the Juniper 

 with stems three feet in diameter. 



Most of the data concerning these buried trees relate to the Juniper 

 or " cedar." When at Furnas in 1857, Drouet was shown an enor- 

 mous semi-carbonised ( ?) trunk of Juniper oxycedrus, which indicated 

 that formerly the trees attained a far greater size than they do to-day. 

 It may here be said that this statement about the carbonisation 

 of the wood is probably incorrect. In a letter to me Colonel Chaves 

 emphatically denies the assertion of Walker, as above quoted, that 

 buried trees in a state of lignite have been unearthed in San Miguel. 

 The most important observations on these buried trees are, as he 

 points out, those of Hartung, who says nothing about such a condition 

 of the wood. It may be here apposite to give the results obtained 

 by the German geologist as stated in his Die Azoren, Leipzig, 1860. 

 He describes large trunks of the Juniper, that still grows on the 

 island, as buried beneath great thicknesses of volcanic materials 

 (blocks of tuff, pumice, and lava) heaped up during the later eruptions 

 in the regions of Sete Cidades and the Furnas Valley in San Miguel 

 (pp. 168, 200). In the Furnas Valley the thickness of the overlying 

 material is stated to be about 400 feet, the date of the last eruption 

 in that locality being 1660. The buried trunks of Juniper of the Sete 

 Cidades are characterised as " machtige Baumstamme " ; and the 

 diameters of two of them are given as two and an eighth and one 

 and a half feet. In this connection Colonel Chaves writes to me 

 saying that the biggest trunk of " cedar " (Juniper) found in the 

 Azores is the trunk still remaining in the Grotta do Inferno at Sete 

 Cidades. When referring to the Azorean Juniper, Trelease (p. 169) 

 remarks that " large logs, apparently of this species, occur deeply 

 buried under secondary volcanic debris in the Grotta do Inferno 

 of the great crater known as Sete Cidades." 



I am indebted to Miss S. Brown, of " Brown's Hotel," Pont a 

 Delgada, for some particulars relating to the buried " cedars " of 

 Furnas, where she long resided with her father and brother. These 

 buried trees were not uncommonly to be seen in the Furnas Valley ; 

 but her father would never believe that trees of the large size indi- 

 cated by the logs existed there, until he found the stump of one of 

 these buried " cedars " showing the bases of the roots. It was 

 found at a place called Alegria, at the north-eastern end of the 

 valley. In a little sketch kindly supplied to me by his son, who 

 was present at the time, this tree-stump is described as forty to 

 forty-six inches high, with a diameter of twenty-four inches at its 

 upper end, which apparently (as far as the sketch indicates) projected 



