5 
Ridley .— The Distribution of Plants. 
This has probably been going on to some extent from the date of the first 
extensive migrations of man all over the world, but it was when the first 
great civilizations began that these changes commenced to seriously affect 
the floras. As long as the population is small, and the family system 
prevails, the wandering savage effects little alteration in the flora. It is 
when the families collect into tribes, settle on an extensive area, and 
cultivate on a large scale, that the great changes in the flora commence. 
In England we do not find any species exterminated by the early 
immigrants, unless possibly Trapa natans , a valued food product, but in 
India, Ceylon, Java, and probably some other countries we may reckon 
that a very large portion, especially of the arboreous vegetation, was 
destroyed from two thousand to four thousand years ago. I have already 
called attention to this in the case of Ceylon in a paper on Endemism 
(‘ Ann. of Bot.’, xxxv. 566). The civilization period in India probably dates 
from an earlier era, and it has been a much more persistently over-populated 
country. The great plains, nearly treeless, over which one travels in almost 
any part of peninsular India must, before the advent of man, have borne 
a totally different and much richer flora, but the great population required 
forest trees for the timber of their houses and temples, and for shipping and 
firewood, and the ground denuded of these trees was afterwards cleared for 
cultivation of materials for food and clothing. The original flora practically 
only persists now in a few mountainous tracts which were notjsuited for 
towns or cultivation areas. Apart from deductions made from the dis¬ 
tribution of plants, I think that the fact of the plains of India being 
formerly afforested is at least strongly suggested by the occurrence all 
over them of the ape Semnopithecus , a genus of monkeys elsewhere 
exclusively occurring in the heart of tropical forests, and the peacock, 
a bird which elsewhere occurs only on the borders of heavily wooded 
country, though it is not, like the monkey, an inhabitant of the interior of 
lofty forests. Both of these animals have been preserved by man from 
religious motives, and seem now to have adapted themselves to the life of 
the villages of the plains. 
Java was thickly populated in the twelfth century, and probably earlier. 
The Dutch commenced to trade there in the seventeenth century, and began 
to develop the country agriculturally early in the nineteenth century. This 
development entailed the destruction of the forests to such an extent that 
one may travel for days through much of the north part of the island and 
see nothing but rice and sugar plantations, so cleanly maintained that there 
is hardly a weed to be seen among the rice-plants. 
We read in Raffles’s* History of Java 5 that in the eastern districts fifty 
to sixty thousand beams a year were delivered to the coast districts in 
about 1800, the timber of the coast area having been exhausted by then, 
and, besides this, large quantities of timber were used in local boat-building. 
