506 VEGETABLE COLONIZATION. 
volcanic and coral islands of the modern Pacific. 
The seed thus stranded upon new-formed land, 
produces a plant which has peculiar provision for 
its support on a surface destitute of soil, by long 
and large aerial roots protruded above the ground 
around the lower part of its trunk. (See PL 63, 
Fig. 1.) These roots on reaching the ground 
are calculated to prop up the plant as buttresses 
surrounding the basis of the stem, so that it 
can maintain its erect position, and flourish in 
barren sand on newly elevated reefs, where little 
soil has yet accumulated. 
We have as yet discovered no remains of the 
leaves, or trunk of Pandaneae in a fossil state, but 
the presence of our unique fruit in the Inferior 
Oolite formation near Charmouth, carries us back 
to a point of time, when we know from other 
evidence that England was in a state of new- 
born land, emerging from the seas of a tepid cli- 
mate ; and shews that combinations of vegetable 
structure such as exist in the modern Pandaneee, 
adapted in a peculiar manner to the office of 
vegetable colonization, prevailed also at the time 
when the Oolite rocks were in process of forma- 
tion. 
This fruit also adds a new link to the chain of 
evidence, which makes known to us the Flora of 
the Secondary periods of geology, and therein 
discloses fresh proofs of Order, and Harmony, 
and of Adaptation of peculiar means to peculiar 
