268 
FLORA OF THE SUNDRIBUNS. 
Coasts eastward to Southern China and Malaya . 8 
Coasts of Malaya only . . . . . 4 
Coasts to Tenasserim only . . • e .6 
Distributed only westward , . . . . 
Coromandel to Eastern Africa ... l 
Coromandel to Eastern Africa but not in Malabar i 
Coromandel, Ceylon ...... i 
Coromandel only ...... i 
Ceylon only . . . . . . .2 
Scinde only ........ i 
Not reported from elsewhere than the Sundribuns 
{Hibiscus tortuosusy Carapa gangeticay Psilotrichum 
ferrughteum.) ... .... 
7 
3 
The Flora to which nearly all except the seven species that are 
distributed only westward belong, is the Malayan ‘Strand-Flora,’ 
composed of littoral species that characterise every shore from 
Melanesia to the Mascarene Islands. Its natural area includes the 
shores of the various archipelagos from Vavau to Fiji, from New 
Caledonia to the Carolines ; the shores of the Philippines, of northern 
Australia, of New Guinea and the other y^^^s'Z-Malayan Islands that 
lie to the east of the Wallace line ; of the Malayan Archipelago and 
Peninsula ; of Ceylon ; of Madagascar, Mauritius, the Comoro Islands, 
the Seychelles. At various points offshoots of this flora branch [a) 
into Polynesia, less marked perhaps than any ; (3) from Ceylon 
north-westward along the coast of Malabar and the Concan, where 
the presence of this factor in the vegetation, though more marked 
than on Polynesian coasts, is not so strong as in other outlying portions 
of its domain ; (^:) to the east coast cf Africa where the element 
is more strongly represented than in Malabar but is still not over- 
whelmingly strong ; (d) northward along the shores of Cochin-China 
and Tonkin as far as the coasts of Southern China and Formosa, a 
few species even reaching Liu-kiu ; and {e) strongest offshoot of all, 
northward along the coasts of Tenasserim and the Andamans to 
Arracan, Chittagong and, as our list shows, into the Sundribuns at 
the head of the Bay of Bengal, with the result that though certainly 
the most outlying part of its whole domain, this Sundribun area 
exhibits the features characteristic of the Flora in question on a 
scale and to a degree nowhere surpassed. ^ The remarkable 
paucity of members of this flora on the Coromandel coast, which 
has nevertheless a distinctive littoral vegetation of its own, is well 
shown by our summary, since besides the 23 species that extend only 
eastward from the Sundribuns, 13 of those that extend also to Ceylon, 
Malabar, the Mascarenes or Africa are absent from Coromandel, as 
are 3 of those that are only of westward distribution ; thus 42 out 0 
