Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/130

 *[Footnote: forest region: between the Ucayale, the Rio de la Madera, and the Tocantin (three great tributaries of the Amazons), and with those of Paraguay and the Provincia de los Missiones. In Africa, except in respect to the coasts, we know nothing of the vegetation from 15° north to 20° south latitude; in Asia we are unacquainted with the Floras of the south and south-east of Arabia, where the highlands rise to about 6400 English feet above the level of the sea,—of the countries between the Thian-schan, the Kuenlün, and the Himalaya, all the west part of China, and the greater part of the countries beyond the Ganges. Still more unknown to the botanist are the interior of Borneo, New Guinea, and part of Australia. Farther to the south the number of species undergoes a wonderful diminution, as Joseph Hooker has well and ably shewn from his own observation in his Antarctic Flora. The three islands of which New Zealand consists extend from 34-1/2° to 47-1/4° S. latitude, and as they contain, moreover, snowy mountains of above 8850 English feet elevation, they must include considerable diversity of climate. The Northern Island has been examined with tolerable completeness from the voyage of Banks and Solander to Lesson and the Brothers Cunningham and Colenso, and yet in more than 70 years we have only become acquainted with less than 700 phænogamous species. (Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, 1843, vol. i. p. 419.) The paucity of vegetable corresponds to the paucity of animal species. Joseph Hooker, in his Flora Antarctica, p. 73-75, remarks that the "botany of the densely wooded regions of the Southern Islands of the New Zealand groups]*