CHAP. XII.] 
THE AZORES. 
251 
Facilities for Dispersal of Azorean Plants. — Now in the course 
of very long periods of time the various causes here enumerated 
would be sufficient to stock the remotest islands with vegetation, 
and a considerable part of the Azorean flora appears well adapted 
to be so conveyed. Of the 439 flowering-plants in Mr. Watson’s 
list, I find that about forty-five belong to genera that have either 
pappus or winged seeds ; sixty-five to such as have very minute 
seeds ; thirty have fleshy fruits such as are greedily eaten by birds ; 
several have hispid seeds ; and eighty-four are glumaceous plants, 
which are all probably well -adapted for being carried partly by 
winds and partly by currents, as well as by some of the other 
causes mentioned. On the other hand we have a very suggestive 
fact in the absence from the Azores of most of the trees and shrubs 
with large and heavy fruits, however common they may be in 
Europe. Such are oaks, chestnuts, hazels, apples, beeches, alders, 
and firs j while the only trees or large shrubs are the Portugal 
laurel, myrtle, laurestinus, elder, Laurus canariensis , Myricafaya, 
and a doubtfully peculiar juniper — all small berry-bearers, and 
therefore likely to have been conveyed by one or other of the 
modes suggested above. 
tances may, I think, have played a great part in the distribution of plants, 
and especially account, in some measure, for the otherwise difficult fact 
(when occurring in the tropics), that widely distant islands have similar 
mountain plants. The Procellaria and Puffinus in nesting, burrow in the 
ground, as far as I have seen choosing often places where the vegetation 
is the thickest. The birds in burrowing get their feathers covered with 
vegetable mould, which must include spores, and often seeds. In high 
latitudes the birds often burrow near the sea-level, as at Tristan d’Acunha 
or Kerguelen’s Land, but in the tropics they choose the mountains for their 
nesting-place (Finsch and Hartlaub, Orn. der Viti- und Tonga-Inseln, 1867, 
Einleitung, p. xviii.). Thus, Puffinus megasi nests at the top of the Koro- 
basa basaga mountain, Yiti Levu, fifty miles from the sea. A Procellaria 
breeds in like manner in the high mountains of Jamaica, I believe at 7,000 
feet. Peale describes the same habit of Procellaria rostrata at Tahiti, and 
I saw the burrows myself amidst a dense growth of fern, &c., at 4,400 feet 
elevation in that island. Phaethon has a similar habit. It nests at the 
crata of Kilauea, Hawaii, at 4, 000 feet elevation, and also high up in Tahiti. 
In order to account for the transportation of the plants, it is not of course 
necessary that the same species of Procellaria or Diomedea should now 
range between the distant points where the plants occur, The ancestor of 
the now differing species might have carried the seeds. The range of the 
genus is sufficient.” 
