Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 1.djvu/246

162 to a latitude south of 40°. Not only do Lord Auckland's group and Campbell's Island exhibit no inconsiderable number of Fuegian plants, considering the immense intervening tract of ocean (upwards of 4,000 miles), but in all the particulars in which their Flora differs from that of New Zealand, it more closely approximates to that of Antarctic America. Strong though the resemblance is in the numerical proportions of the orders, and in the similarity of many of the smaller plants, the trees and shrubs of the one differ in every respect from those of the other locality; for beeches extend from a latitude in the American continent which corresponds to their principal parallel in New Zealand beyond the latitude of Lord Auckland's group, as far south as Cape Horn itself, in the 57th degree.

"The relation between the Flora now under consideration and that of the northern regions is but slight; and the same may be said, though not to an equal extent, of any two countries in the higher latitudes of the opposite hemispheres. This group lies in the latitude of England, yet we recognise in it only three indigenous plants of our own island,—the Cardamine hirsuta, Montia, and Callitriche. Of the sixty genera twenty-two are English, and twenty-eight natives of a more northern latitude than England. Hardly any of these belong to the divisions Calycifloræ, Compositæ, or to the higher orders of the Monocotyledones; while, on the other hand, they include the whole of the Thalamifloræ,