22 
Ridley .— The Distribution of Plants. 
eastern South America, Africa, the Mascarene Islands up to the western 
Himalayas—the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, and Sumatra being submerged. 
This area, Sud-Atlantis, gets smaller in early Tertiary eras, but there is still 
a connexion between Guiana and North Brazil up to Cape Verde and south 
to Angola. In the Miocene period Sud-Atlantis is broken through and 
Africa and America are quite separated, and never reconnect. 
If this disposition of sea and land is endorsed by other geologists, 
it would account for the large number of genera and some species common 
to both sides of the Atlantic, and especially would account, for the forest 
Cyperaceae of Angola and Madagascar occurring in South America but 
being absent from tropical Asia, and the date of this flora would be before 
the Miocene period. 
It might be suggested that the plants common to Africa and America 
had been transported by sea-currents or by birds, but against this there is 
the fact that hardly one of the African maritime or sea-shore plants dis¬ 
persed by sea occurs in the New World, nor any of the New World species 
in the Old World, and, besides the fact that it does not appear that birds 
cross from the Old World into the New, the plants referred to are not 
such as are bird-borne. 
Sea-dispersed Plants. 
In deciding whether a plant comes into this class or not we have to 
take into account any special modification of the fruit or seed for dispersal 
by sea, such as the thick corky pericarp of Barj'ingtonia speciosa , Forst., or 
the fibrous woody pericarp of Cerbera , or the enlarged bladder-like calyx of 
Hernandia , and it is further essential that the plant may be able to grow on 
the sandy beach or in tidal mud, as the case may be. A great deal has 
been written by Schimper, Hemsley, and others on the strand flora and its 
dispersal, and Guppy, ‘Observations of a Naturalist in the Pacific’, has 
summed up most of this work, and added so much that comparatively little 
has to be added. I cannot agree with many of the latter’s deductions from 
the facts, but I do not intend to criticize them in this paper; I will merely 
content myself with a few remarks bearing on the strand flora of the Malay 
Peninsula which are not treated of by Schimper or others. 
Mr. Guppy writes a good deal about the distribution of plants of the 
strand flora, i.e. sea-dispersed plants found inland, especially in the 
Polynesian Islands. This occurs, as is well known, in many parts of 
the world, the strand flora being met with often on the tops of mountains. 
I think it will be found that in all cases the strand flora in such spots is 
due to the sea having formerly reached these altitudes and left its flora there 
stranded. There are no such examples in the Malay Peninsula, so far as 
has yet been seen, as there is indeed no evidence of the sea having been 
