Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/138

 *[Footnote: *sphere, in New Holland, palms, of which there are very few, (six or seven species) only advance to 34° of latitude (see Robert Brown's general remarks on the Botany of Terra Australis, p. 45); and in New Zealand, where Sir Joseph Banks first saw an Areca palm, they reach the 38th parallel. In Africa, which, quite contrary to the ancient and still widely prevailing belief, is poor in species of palms, only one palm, the Hyphæne coriacea, advances to Port Natal in 30° latitude. The continent of South America presents almost the same limits in respect to latitude. On the eastern side of the Andes, in the Pampas of Buenos Ayres and in the Cis-Plata province, palms extend, according to Auguste de St.-Hilaire, to 34° and 35° S. latitude. This is also the latitude to which on the western side of the Andes the Coco de Chile (our Jubæa spectabilis?), the only Chilian palm, extends, according to Claude Gay, being as far as the banks of the Rio Maule. (See also Darwin's Journal, edition of 1845, p. 244 and 256).

I will here introduce some detached remarks which I wrote in March, 1801, on board the ship in which we were sailing from the palmy shores of the mouth of the Rio Sinu, west of Darien, to Cartagena de las Indias.

"We have now, in the course of the two years which we have spent in South America, seen 27 different species of palms. How many must Commerson, Thunberg, Banks, Solander, the two Forsters, Adanson, and Sonnerat, have observed in their distant voyages! Yet, at the present moment, when I write these lines, our systems of botany do not include more than from 14 to 18 systematically]*