NARRATIVE OF THE CRUISE. 
945 
these islands. Several of the plants are quite rare, and the greater bulk of the vegeta- 
tion consists of very few species, most prominent among which are Phylicanitida 
and Spartina arundinacea. The latter is a stout reed, which covers large areas, and 
the former is the only tree, and is oftener shrubby than arboreous in dimensions. The 
flora of the islands of Amsterdam and St. Paul, which lie in about the same latitude 
as the Tristan da Cunha group, though separated therefrom by nearly ninety degrees of 
longitude, is essentially the same as that of Tristan da Cunha ; yet nine of the thirty- 
three species of flowering plants are apparently endemic. Pliylica nitida constitutes the 
whole of the woody vegetation of Amsterdam Island, but it is wanting in St. Paul ; 
and Spartina arundinacea is exceedingly abundant in both islands. Here, as in Tristan 
da Cunha, there is no endemic generic element ; and all the genera except Pliylica , 
which is African, are represented both in New Zealand and temperate South America. 
“ The vegetation of the remainder of the Southern Islands dealt with, namely, 
Marion, the Crozets, Kerguelen, and Heard, is a fragment of a flora characteristic of' the 
detached regions, generally, of the coldest southern zone inhabited by flowering plants, 
with two endemic monotypic genera. These are : Lyallia, restricted, as far as known, to 
Kerguelen Island, and Pringlea, the Kerguelen Cabbage, which is found in all the islands. ' 
Out of a total of thirty vascular plants, six, or one-fifth, are endemic ; seven are American, 
and not found in New Zealand or any of the neighbouring small islands, though two 
of them also occur in Amsterdam Island ; two are found in New Zealand or the 
neighbouring islands, but not in South America or any of the islands adjacent thereto ; 
while fifteen are common to the New Zealand and American regions. 
“ Juan Fernandez and Mas-a-fuera, like St. Helena, possess a large generic endemic 
element in their flora, associated, however, with a relatively larger number of endemic 
species of other genera. There are about one hundred species of flowering plants, probably 
indigenous, and between forty and fifty species of ferns. Seventy species, belonging to 
forty genera and twenty-six natural orders, are endemic, and they are remarkable for the 
large proportion of trees and shrubs they include. Thus, deducting the grasses and 
sedges, of which there are nine species, out of the remaining sixty-one species, forty-six, 
or more than two-thirds, are shrubby or arboreous. Out of the forty-six genera of 
flowering plants represented in Juan Fernandez, twenty are so generally diffused as not 
to be specially characteristic of any particular region ; ten are endemic ; seven are other- 
wise restricted to South America, or do not extend farther north than Mexico ; five are 
represented both in the New Zealand and South American regions ; two are represented 
in the New Zealand but not in the South American region; and two have a wide range 
in the northern hemisphere, extending southward, however, only in America. 
“ The botanical collections from the Southeastern Moluccas and the Admiralty 
Islands consist, as far as the flowering plants are concerned, almost entirely of littoral 
species of very wide distribution, associated with a small number of endemic species of 
