June, 1834. 



VEGETATION. 



271 



The kind of climate here described appears to be common to 

 the southern parts of the whole of the southern hemisphere. 

 Although so inhospitable to our feelings, and to most of the 

 plants from the warmer parts of Europe, yet it is most favour- 

 able to the native vegetation. The forests, which cover the 

 entire country between the latitudes of 38° and 45°, rival in 

 luxuriance those of the glowing intertropical regions. Whilst 

 in Chiloe (lat. 42°) I could almost have fancied myself in 

 Brazil. Stately trees of many kinds, with smooth and highly 

 coloured barks, are loaded by parasitical plants of the mono- 

 cotyledonous structure ; large and elegant ferns are numerous ; 

 and arborescent grasses intwine the trees into one entangled 

 mass, to the height of thirty or forty feet above the ground. 

 Palm-trees grow in lat. 37° ; an arborescent grass very like 

 a bamboo in 40° ; and another closely-allied kind, of great 

 length but not erect, even as far south as 45°. 



In another part of this same hemisphere, which has so 

 uniform a character owing to its large proportional area of 

 sea, Forster found parasitical orchideous plarife living south 

 of lat. 45° in New Zealand. Tree-ferns thrive luxuriantly 

 near Hobart Town, in Van Diemen^s Land. I measured 

 one there which was exactly six feet in circumference ; and 

 its height from the ground to the base of the fronds ap- 

 peared to be very little under twenty. Mr. Brown says* 

 " an arborescent species of the same genus {Dicksonia) was 

 found by Forster, in New Zealand, at Dusky Bay, in nearly 

 46° S., the highest latitude in which tree-ferns have yet been 

 observed. It is remarkable that, although they have so con- 

 siderable a range in the southern hemisphere, no tree-fern 

 has been found beyond the northern tropic : a distribution 

 in the two hemispheres somewhat similar to this has been 

 already noticed respecting the Orchidese that are parasitical 

 on trees. 



Even in Tierra del Fuego, Captain King describes the 

 " vegetation thriving most luxuriantly, and large woody stem- 



* Appendix to Flinder's Voyage, pp. 575 and 584. 



