PEOBLEMS OF DISTRIBUTION 75 
in the Western Highlands for pasturage ; to both of which 
he makes constant reference, ahke scientific and practical. 
He sends five sets of his St. Helena specimens home for various 
recipients ; he takes some 300 specimens away with him from 
the Cape on his first short visit there (March 17- April 6, 1840) 
for examination at sea. 
By the time he has visited Kerguelen's Land (May 12- 
July 20, 1840) his researches begin to take definite shape, both 
in subject and in outlook, foreshadowing what was to appear 
in his Flora Antarctica. Here emerges his serious interest 
in the problems of distribution thrust upon him ever more 
forcibly by the plants, living and fossil, so far removed from 
any parent continent, and by the nature of Antarctic vegeta- 
tion in general. He found the Kerguelen flora in form peculiarly 
S. American, with some plants common to the Auckland 
group and more to the Falklands. Later in the voyage he is 
enabled to write under date November 25, 1842, * My regions 
are different both in climate and forms from any other.' At 
Kerguelen's Land above all, his favourite cryptogams, so much 
less known than the flowering plants, and here relatively 
abundant, invited his study. * You direct my attention,' he 
writes to his father (September 7, 1840), * particularly to 
Cryptogamia ; believe me that I have at Kerguelen's Land 
strained every nerve to add to its scanty Flora in that 
particular.' 
The Journal contains a very full description of this lonely, 
rugged, storm-swept island, for 
though two months there, to the last day I went botanising, 
and as far as I know I have left no hole unexamined or stone 
unturned. . . . You cannot conceive the dehght which the 
new discoveries afforded as they slowly revealed themselves, 
though in many cases it was all I could do to collect from 
the frozen ground as much as would serve to identify a 
species. 
Indeed the very first day he landed, 
arriving on board, I found that I had ascertained the existence 
of at least thirty species of plants in one day, and within 
