Fossil Coniferous Wood from Kerguelen Island. 
BY 
W. N. EDWARDS, B.A. 
( Published by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.) 
With Plate XXIII and four Figures in the Text, 
T HE material described in this paper was mainly collected in 1840 in the 
vicinity of Christmas Harbour, Kerguelen Island (lat. 49 0 S.), by 
Surgeon R. McCormick, who accompanied Sir James Ross on the voyage 
of the Erebus and Terror to Antarctic regions, and who bequeathed his 
geological collections to the British Museum (Natural History) in 1890. 
The McCormick collection of Kerguelen woods contains about forty 
or fifty pieces of various sizes, some of which are obviously very poorly 
preserved. Fourteen specimens were sectioned by Mr. J. Lomax, and 
though some were very different in external appearance and mode of 
preservation, it was rather disappointing to find that they agreed very 
closely in internal structure, and have all been included in a single species 
of Cupressinoxylon. 
There are also a few specimens probably presented by McCormick’s 
colleague, (Sir) j. D. Hooker, some of which were recently described by 
Prof. A. C. Seward as Dadoxylon kergtielense (Seward, 1919, p. 185). The 
Bryson collection of plant sections in the British Museum, which includes 
Nicol’s specimens and others made many years ago, contains two slides 
(51534 and 51748) labelled ‘ Kerguellans Land ’, but there is no further 
information in the register. They are sections of poorly preserved dicotyle- 
donous wood, and seem to have been cut from the same specimen. The 
Museum collections do not contain, however, any undoubted blocks of fossil 
dicotyledonous wood from Kerguelen. 
Occurrence of the wood . The northern extremity of Kerguelen Island 
is largely covered with thick beds of basalt. Ross (1847, vol. i, p. 71) states 
that the basalt ‘ is upwards of 500 feet thick, and rests upon the older rocks 
at an elevation of 600 feet above the sea ; and it was between these rocks 
of different ages that the fossil trees were chiefly found, and one exceeding 
seven feet in circumference was dug out and sent to England \ (This 
specimen has not been traced.) Ross says further that the wood was found 
[Annals of Botany, Vol. XXXV. No. CXL. October, 1921.] 
