5§2 
Sinnott and Bailey . — The Origin and 
more plants have apparently won success through reducing their stature 
than through adding to it in the way that Darwin suggests. 
The flora of oceanic islands is, of course, in a rather unusual environ- 
ment, and conclusions drawn solely from a study of it cannot be regarded 
as entirely conclusive. There are other regions, however, with a much more 
extensive land surface, which have long been more or less isolated, and 
which, therefore, may be expected to preserve an ancient type of floral 
composition. 
4. The Herbaceous Element in the Temperate Floras of the Southern 
Hemisphere. 
A. Australia. 
The best examples of such partially isolated continental areas are the 
temperate regions of the southern hemisphere. Perhaps the most notable 
of these is the island continent of Australia. This great body of land has 
been cut off to a large extent from other continental areas apparently since 
early in the Tertiary, and has consequently received but a scanty number 
of immigrants in recent times. This is well shown in the character of its 
fauna, which preserves a comparative abundance of many such types as the 
marsupials, struthious birds, Dipnoi, &c., which we have every reason to 
believe were at an earlier period much more widely distributed over the 
globe. Many recent types of animals have become widely dispersed only 
since Australia became isolated, and have consequently been unable to 
enter it, save in rare cases. 
From its high degree of endemism (89 per cent.), the flora also appears 
to be an ancient one, and many of its most characteristic plants seem to 
have been widely distributed over the earth in Tertiary time. Many of the 
Myrtaceae inhabited Europe and America in the Miocene. Leaves which 
have been identified as belonging to the Proteaceae, the most typical 
Australian family, have been found frequently in the European Tertiaries, 
and members of several other families which at present reach their greatest 
development in Australia were formerly much more widespread. We 
should, therefore, expect to find that in the composition of its vegetation 
with regard to the relative proportions of herbs and woody plants, the 
Australian flora would exhibit a more primitive condition than do those of 
the northern hemisphere. 
With this point in view, a careful analysis of the Australian vegetation 
was undertaken, using Bentham’s c Flora Australiensis * as a basis. Separate 
counts were made for Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, 
and Western Australia. As a check on these counts, Moore’s ‘ Flora of 
New South Wales’ was also gone through. The Northern Territory, 
