Stew art—Botanical Conditions pn the Galapagos Islands. 309 
and northeast. There is a small cove on the northeast side, shel¬ 
tered by 1 a small islet, which affords a good landing place for 
boats. Good anchorage can be obtained off the month of this 
cove, but as none is marked on the charts of these islands, vessels 
should take soundings from a small boat before attempting to 
come to anchor here. 
The sides of the island are steep in most places, and all of the 
lower part is covered with loose fragments of lava among which 
there is a scanty soil. There are two old craters in the central 
part of the island which directly join one another there being no 
distinct rim separating the two. The crater to the north is the 
smaller, and its side walls are very steep and redish in color as 
is the soil which covers its floor. The southern crater forms a 
broad basin the floor of which is 850 ft. above sea level, and 400 
ft. above the floor of the northern crater. There are some irreg¬ 
ularities in the floor of the larger crater, but the most of it forms 
a rather flat plain, with occasional low places in it, some of which 
appeared to have been recently filled with water. There is a 
considerable amount of soil in this crater, which is light gray in 
color and loose in texture. 
There is a high ridge to the east of the larger crater which in 
one place attains an elevation of 1,300 ft., the highest point on 
the island. The west side of this ridge is steep and there are 
cliffs in some places of a considerable height. The east side of 
this ridge is not so steep, however, but slopes downward to the 
tops of the cliffs along the eastern shore of the island. The up¬ 
per part of this frdge is irregular and is covered with soil in 
places made up of disintegrated lava and vegetable mold. 
Halophytic plants are but poorly represented on the island, 
and so far as was observed, consist of a single tree of Avicennia 
officinalis, a few Laguncularia bushes, and a few small stunted 
trees of Rhizophora Mangle, all of which grow at the end of the 
cove on the northeast side of the island. Sesuvium Edmonstonei 
also occurs here but not under halophyitc conditions. It is 
found in various places on the northeast side of the island to an 
elevation of 450 ft. 
Unfortunately we were not able to get to this island during 
the rainy season, so at the times we visited here the vegetation 
was in the resting condition. The lower parts had more the ap¬ 
pearance of a winter landscape in temperate region than that of 
a region within only a few miles of the equator. With the ex- 
