CHAP. XII.] 



THE AZOEES. 



251 



Facilities for Dis])eTsal of Azorecm Plants. — Now in the course 

 of very long periods of time the various causes here enumerated 

 would be sufficient to stock the remotest islands with vegetation, 

 and a considerable part of the Azorean flora appears well adapted 

 to be so conveyed. Of the 439 flowering- plants in Mr. Watson's 

 list, I find that about forty-five belong to genera that have either 

 pappus or winged seeds ; sixty-five to such as have very minute 

 seeds ; thirty have fleshy fruits such as are greedily eaten by birds ; 

 several have hispid seeds ; and eighty-four are glumaceous plants, 

 which are all probably well -adapted for being carried partly by 

 winds and partly by currents, as well as by some of the other 

 causes mentioned. On the other hand we have a very suggestive 

 fact in the absence from the Azores of most of the trees and shrubs 

 with large and heavy fruits, however common they may be in 

 Europe. Such are oaks, chestnuts, hazels, apples, beeches, alders, 

 and firs ; while the only trees or large shrubs are the Portugal 

 laurel, myrtle, laurestinus, elder, Laiirus canarieiisis, Myrica faya, 

 and a doubtfully peculiar juniper — all small berry-bearers, and 

 therefore likely to have been conveyed by one or other of the 

 modes suggested above. 



tances may, I think, have played a great part in the distribution of plants, 

 and especially account, in some measure, for the otherwise difficult fact 

 (when occurring in the tropics), that widely distant islands have similar 

 mountain plants. The Procellaria and Puffinus in nesting, burrow in the 

 ground, as far as I have seen, choosing often places where the vegetation 

 is the thickest. The birds in burrowing get their feathers covered with 

 vegetable mould, which must include spores, and often seeds. In high 

 latitudes the birds often burrow near the sea-level, as at Tristan d'Acunha 

 or Kerguelen's Land, but in the tropics they choose the mountains for their 

 nesting-place (Finsch and Hartlaub, Orn. der Viti- und Tonga-Inseln, 1867, 

 Einleitung, p. xviii.). Thus, Puffinus megasi nests at the top of the Koro- 

 basa basaga mountain, Viti Levu, fifty miles from the sea. A Procellaria 

 breeds in like manner in the high mountains of Jamaica, I believe at 7,000 

 feet. Peale describes the same habit of Procellaria rostrata at Tahiti, and 

 I saw the burrows myself amidst a dense growth of fern, &c., at 4,400 feet 

 elevation in that island. Phaethon has a similar habit. It nests at the 

 crata of Kilauea, Hawaii, at 4,000 feet elevation, and also high up in Tahiti. 

 In order to account for the transportation of the plants, it is not of course 

 necessary that the same species of Procellaria or Diomedea should now 

 range between the distant points where the plants occur. The ancestor of 

 the now differing species might have carried the seeds. The range of the 

 genus is sufficient.'' 



