Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/170

 *[Footnote: The Islands of Japan, notwithstanding the vicinity of the Continent of Asia, have a very distinct character of vegetation. Thunberg's supposed Japanese Weymouth Pine, (Pinus Strobus) which would offer an important phenomenon, is only a planted tree, and is besides quite distinct from the American species of Pine. It is Pinus korajensis (Sieb.), and has been brought to Nipon from the peninsula of Corea, and from Kamtschatka.

Of the 114 species of the Genus Pinus with which we are at present acquainted, not one belongs to the Southern Hemisphere, for the Pinus merkusii described by Junghuhn and De Vriese belongs to the part of the Island of Sumatra which is north of the Equator, to the district of the Battas; and Pinus insularis (Endl.) although it was at first given in Loudon's Arboretum as P. timoriensis, really belongs to the Philippines. Besides the Genus Pinus, the Southern hemisphere, according to the present state of our now happily advancing knowledge of the geography of plants, is entirely without species of Cupressus, Salisburia (Gingko), Cunninghamia (Pinus lanceolota, Lamb.) Thuja, (one of the species of which, Th. gigantea, Nutt., found on the banks of the Columbia, has a height of above 180 Eng. feet), Juniperus, and Taxodium (Mirbel's Schubertia). I include the last-named genus with the less hesitation, as a Cape of Good Hope plant (Sprengel's Schubertia capensis) is no Taxodium, but constitutes a genus of itself, Widringtonia, (Endl.) in quite a different division of the family of Coniferæ.

This absence, from the Southern Hemisphere, of true Abietineæ, Juniperineæ, Cupressineæ, and all the Taxodineæ, as]*