FLORAS OF EASTERN AND WESTERN NEWFOUNDLAND 24 1 
west coast, a region where fog and bleak winds are dispelled by the 
warm sun, is the condition in southeastern Newfoundland from Notre 
Dame Bay to the Avalon Peninsula. This eastern and southeastern 
coast is vastly more populous than the west coast, the people being 
chiefly fishermen and miners, but agricultural pursuits are almost 
negligible in this area. The Arctic Current, after following the Lab- 
rador coast, sweeps the east side of Newfoundland as a positive stream 
clogged into mid-summer with floe-ice and often closing the harbors 
to navigation; and experiences through several summers, reinforced 
by the statements of permanent residents, justify the statement that 
almost any day through the summer season one may look from the 
eastern shores with the prospect of detecting an iceberg. In other 
words, the east coast as contrasted with the west coast is bleak, foggy 
and with a subarctic climate; and the people of the east coast are 
severely handicapped even in raising potatoes and cabbages. 
Now, turning to the vegetation of these two extreme areas, regions 
separated by lOO miles or more of tundra, we find that in the West the 
plants of the limestone valleys, talus slopes, brook ravines, river 
valleys, and open ledges are almost universally species of high northern 
distribution, occurring in western Newfoundland as outlyers from a 
broad circumpolar range. Peaty or wet limy depressions of the west 
coast, for instance, are occupied by Kohresia caricina, a characteristic 
sedge of high-northern distribution, very rare in America except on 
the north side of the Straits of Belle Isle^ and in western Newfoundland, 
or with it Juncus triglumis or Tofieldia palustris, species which we 
rarely, if ever, see south of western Newfoundland. With these 
plants or on wet limestone slopes the calcicolous Saxifrages abound, 
Saxifraga oppositifolia (fig. i), of the widest circumpolar distribution, 
extending southward on wet calcareous slopes to western Newfound- 
land, Anticosti, the Gaspe Peninsula, and the northern Green Moun- 
tains, and pushing south into the Canadian Rocky Mountains; or 
with these species Saxifraga aizoides, a characteristic plant of the 
Canadian Rockies, or 5. caespitosa, of broad circumpolar range. 
Rocky ravines and shores of the western coast and the North Peninsula 
are made beautiful by that handsomest of willows, Salix vestita (fig. 2), 
^ Contrary to the general impression that Labrador is a vast barren of Archaean 
gneiss, it should be pointed out that at the extreme Southeast, along the Straits of 
Belle Isle, the rocks are Cambrian limestones and sandstones; while the extreme 
Northeast consists of highly basic ranges of mountains. 
