Origin of Species Variorum

Comparison with 1866

fifty of the flowering plants of Tierra del Fuego, forming no inconsiderable part of its scanty flora, are common to Europe, enormously remote as these two points are; and there are many closely allied species. On the lofty mountains of equatorial America a host of peculiar species belonging to European genera occur. On the Organ mountains of Brazil, some few European temperate, some antarctic, and some Andean genera were found by Gardner, which do not exist in the low intervening hot countries; and I have been informed that Agassiz has lately discovered plain marks of glacial action on these same mountains. On the Silla of Caraccas the illustrious Humboldt long ago found species belong- ing to genera characteristic of the Cordillera. In Africa, several forms characteristic of Europe and some few representatives of the flora of the Cape of Good Hope occur on the mountains of Abyssinia. ↑ At the Cape of Good Hope a very few European species, believed not to have been introduced by man, and on the mountains some few representative European forms are found, which have not been discovered in the intertropical parts of Africa. Dr. Hooker has also lately shown that several of the plants living on the upper parts of the lofty island of Fernando Po and on the neighbouring Cameroon mountains, in the Gulf of Guinea, are closely related to those on the mountains of Abyssinia, and likewise to those of temperate Europe. It now also appears, as I hear from Dr. Hooker, that some of these same temperate plants have been discovered by the Rev. R.T. Lowe on the mountains of the Cape de Verde islands. This extension of the same temperate forms, almost under the equator, across the whole continent of Africa and to the mountains of the Cape de Verde archipelago, is one of the most astonishing facts ever recorded in the distribution of plants. On the Himalaya, and on the isolated mountain-ranges of the peninsula of India, on the heights of Ceylon, and on the volcanic cones of Java, many plants occur, either identically the same or representing each other, and at the same time representing plants of Europe, not found in the intervening hot lowlands. A list of the genera of plants collected on the loftier peaks of Java raises a picture of a collection made on a hill in Europe! Still more striking is the fact that peculiar southern Australian forms are .. represented by plants growing on the summits of the mountains of Borneo. Some of these Australian forms, as I hear from Dr. Hooker, extend along the heights of the peninsula of Malacca, and are thinly scattered on the one hand over India, and on the other hand as far north as Japan.

On the southern mountains of Australia, Dr. F. Müller has discovered several European species; other