CCII.— THE STRAWBERRY-TREE. 
Arbutus TJnedo Linne. 
B ROAD-LEAVED evergreens dread frost and are thus characteristic of warm 
climates or of those insular conditions in higher latitudes where frost is rare, 
rather than of the interior of continents, where, though the summer may be hotter, 
the winter is also colder. This determines the geographical distribution of the 
Strawberry-tree (. Arbutus Unedo Linne). It is common all round the Mediterranean 
from Syria, Anatolia, the Archipelago, Thrace, Greece, and Dalmatia, to southern 
Italy, Algeria, Spain, and the Cevennes. In the Tell, or cultivated coastal, region 
of Algeria, it flourishes in the brushwood under the shade of the Cork Oak, and 
it is particularly abundant in the maquis of Corsica. It extends along the coast of 
Portugal and the Landes of Bordeaux as far north as Rochelle ; but it cannot stand 
the cold winter of Paris. It has naturalised itself, growing freely from self-sown 
seed, on the warm moist slopes above the Bristol Avon at Clifton ; and it has long 
flourished in the neighbourhood of Killarney. 
In the latter locality, where it exceeds thirty feet in height and two feet in the 
girth of its stem, it had acquired the name Cane-apple prior to the first English record 
of its occurrence there. That, however, was not until Parkinson’s “ Theatrum 
Botanicum ” in 1640, while the suggestion of those who do not believe it to be truly 
wild, is that it may have been introduced either by the followers of St. Finian, the 
leper of Innisfallen, at the close of the sixth century, or by the Franciscans, who 
founded Muckross Abbey in the fifteenth. Professor Charles Babington in 1835 
came to the conclusion that the Arbutus was indigenous at Killarney, and Mr. Edward 
Step writes, in 1904, of finding it “in the woods at Woodstock, Co. Kilkenny, in a 
situation where it seemed unlikely such a tree would be planted.” Considering, 
however, the extent to which this species has established itself at Clifton, that the 
climate of Kerry certainly suits it, that its fruit is greedily eaten by birds and its seed 
so dispersed, and that ex hypothesi it may have been introduced four or even eleven 
centuries ago, we feel bound to admit that the introduction theory is at least tenable. 
If, on the other hand, we attribute the existence of the tree in Ireland to natural 
causes, it affords an illustration of one of the most far-reaching speculations of 
modern geography, which was put forward by Hewett Watson in 1832 and inde- 
pendently by Edward Forbes in the year following. If we look at a map showing 
the ioo-fathom line around the submerged plateau upon which the British Isles 
stand, we shall see that this sounding sweeps from the north-west coast of the 
Asturian provinces across the Bay of Biscay and then turns, considerably to the west 
of Brittany, towards the coast of Kerry. If then, in a former age, when the whole 
of north-western Europe stood more than 600 feet relatively higher with regard 
to the sea, so that there was a land connection between Ireland and the Asturias, 
the Arbutus spread, with other species, along this ancient littoral as it does along 
