ST. HELENA • 97 
The Terror has been a sad drawback to us, having every 
now and then to shorten sail for her. I cannot tell you how 
delighted we were to get here (St. Helena), having been 
upon salt Junk for 74 days, with hard biscuit for vege- 
tables. . . . The weather has been during the voyage very 
fine indeed, though very hot at times, so much so that 
sleeping upon deck is quite dehghtful. . . . 
St. Helena as a colonised island was very different from 
the others. Appealed to as a fount of botanical culture he 
pokes fun at himself as • a practical gardener. Strawberries 
and similar European plants refused to fruit in the absence of 
a regular summer and winter season. He suggested on theo- 
retical grounds two alternative methods of checking their ' run- 
ning to leaf ' ; ' between these two methods I hope I have 
hit a gardener's plan, or what will look like one ; if the more 
orthodox plan succeeds my suggestion will, I hope, be looked 
upon as the invention of a fertile brain instead of the 
guess of an ignoramus.' 
But ' the plant that pleased him more than any other ' 
was a fine Araucaria (monkey puzzle). Few specimens then 
existed in Britain, and this, as a new species from Brazil, 
is described in full detail. The fruit, it was asserted, never 
ripened ; but his keen eye noted several seedlings which the 
owner of the garden had never observed. He has a boyish 
delight in climbing the spiny tree and knocking off some cones, 
because travellers declared the tree unscalable, and at sea he 
writes, ' even now I look at the cones slung up in my cabin by 
a true lover's knot with great satisfaction.' 
But here also he is confronted by his favourite problems of 
geographical distribution, of the interaction of imported animals 
and plants on the old flora. The climate differs on the wet 
side of Diana's Peak ; so do the plants. He perceives a striking 
phase of what was afterwards to be called the ' struggle for 
existence ' bluntly revealed in the action of animals on plants, 
plants on each other, and plants again on animals, owing to 
the introduction of new forms of life into the island. 
So, he writes in his Journal from his passing notes — time 
forbidding fuller observations : 
