INTERESTS OF KERGUELEN'S LAND 79 
all thrive well on the Island, and would be no ordinary boon 
to the whalers. The little Banunculus is the only acrid 
plant I have found near the harbour, so I suppose it must 
have been this that Cook's party ate for cress ; it appeared 
to me anything but wholesome. 
Among the seaweeds many are doubtless edible ; on 
one occasion I found our gunner seated on a rock with his 
feet in the surf passing down what he called dulse ; it 
certainly was eatable raw ; I need not add my friend was 
a Scotchman. The Lichens are all much too tough to afford 
any hopes of rivalling the Iceland Moss. Some of the Musci 
might be used by the Laplanders as they do their own, as 
swaddhng clothes for their babies. 
Strange that this was an island in S. latitude corresponding 
to that of Jersey in the northern hemisphere. 
To the last hour of his stay at Kerguelen's Land he was 
absorbed in the strange interests of the place, and writing 
from Tasmania, November 1840, with the prospect of visiting 
another oceanic solitude, Campbell Island, he speaks of it as 
another edition of Kerguelen's Land, I suppose. I know 
I shall be happy there, for I was sorry at leaving Christmas 
Harbour ; by finding food for * the mind one may grow 
attached to the most wretched spots on the globe, yet 
hitherto I fear I have rather played with Botany than done 
any good at it. 
The long stay at the Falkland Islands in 1842 gave time 
for generalising upon the botanical material collected in the 
South. The main lines of his thought' begin to stand out 
clearly in his letters of this date. To his father he writes on 
November 25, 1842 : 
The Crypt ogamiae are far more numerous. I am not 
aware of having omitted any species of any Nat. Order 
which came under my notice ; this perhaps prevented my 
getting any better specimens of some Phaenogamic plants 
that were in flower, but anybody can collect them, and no 
botanists will attend to the Cryptogamic. I am further 
anxious to know the proportions that the Nat. Orders bear 
to themselves at different Antarctic Longitudes and to 
