524 Taylor.— Endemism in the Bahama Flora. 
antiquity of endemics could not be measured by their dispersal. For in 
some cases, particularly among the relicts of the pine-barrens, unquestioned 
antiquity goes with rather restricted distribution. 
In the Bahama flora, necessarily a recent one, due to the geological 
youth of the islands, a somewhat detailed study of the endemics as 
contrasted with the non-endemic flora shows that these two floral elements 
are not widely different as to their dispersal. 
Found only on one island 
Found only on two islands . 
Found only on three islands 
Found on many islands 
Endemics. 
Non-endemics. 
2 9*5 % 
203 % 
14.5 
13-7 
13.6 
9-3 * 
42.4 
5^-7 
The essential similarity of these percentages warrants the statement 
that the dispersal of endemics in the Bahamas is not very different from 
that of the general flora of the archipelago.^ It may not be shooting 
beyond the mark to suggest that the dispersal, or, as Dr. Willis prefers to 
call it, the commonness or rarity of endemics, may be dictated by forces 
that play as well upon the endemic as upon the non-endemic elements of 
the Bahama flora. 
Of those endemics confined to a single island, which constitute 29*5 
per cent, of the endemic flora, and which might perhaps be considered the 
rarest, Dr. Britton has written the following for this paper : 
‘ In almost all cases of which record was made by the collectors of 
endemics inhabiting, as far as known, only one island, the plants grow 
in large or considerable quantities. A few species are known from but a 
single specimen, or few, but wider search might reveal them in quantity.’ 
Both from the record of their distribution, and from the observations 
of those most competent to make them, it is thus apparent that the age 
of endemics in the Bahamas cannot be measured either by their dispersal or 
by their frequency. 
The geological youth of the islands is reflected in the lack of endemic 
genera, only Neobracea, a shrub of the Apocynaceae, being peculiar to the 
region. If, as most students of distribution agree, endemic genera are to 
be considered as badges of antiquity, and they have been so interpreted in 
St. Helena, Galapagos, Hawaii, and hosts of isolated islands, then the lack 
of them in the Bahamas should brand that flora with the stigma of youth, 
if the geologists had not already compelled us to do so. Such a recent 
flora, scattered over a rather restless archipelago, so far as subsidence and 
emergence is concerned, ought to show among its endemics a goodly 
proportion of herbaceous species. For it has also been shown, for at least 
some regions, that endemic species in non-endemic genera are mostly herbs, 
which from the brevity of their life-cycle are assumed to have greater 
opportunity to become developed than woody plants. As the Bahamas 
