Page:Flora Hongkongensis.djvu/19

Rh enabled me, with the assistance of Dr. Hooker's lists and notes, to give that range for every species, as far as can be derived from the Kew herbaria or other reliable sources. This distribution is, however, only stated in a few general terms specially directed to showing the immediate relation of the Hongkong Flora to that of other countries. The precise limitation of the area of each species would require far too much labour and detail to come within the scope of the present work.

For the purpose of obtaining even a general notion of the nature of this geographical relation of our Flora, it was necessary to tabulate the species according to the areas they occupy as far as our present knowledge of them extends, although our information on the subject is as yet far too scanty to give any very satisfactory results. The Flora of the hilly ranges of continental South China, of which Hongkong is as it were an outlying spur, is almost unknown to us; that of the country connecting these hills and the Cochin-Chinese coasts with Burmah, Silhet, and Assam, is a complete blank. On the other side, looking to the Philippine Islands, the nearest land connecting Hongkong with the eastern islands of the Indian Archipelago, although a large number of their species have been described, yet this has been done so imperfectly, and piecemeal, as it were, at Manilla, or in different European capitals, with so little critical comparison between the different collections or with the general tropical Asiatic Flora, that it is very difficult to obtain any definite notions of their vegetation. We have no serviceable general Flora of the Philippines (for Blanco's species require re-identification), and no one of our herbaria contains probably more than one-half of the plants indigenous to them.

Such lists, however, as I have been able to prepare of the Hongkong species arranged according to their geographical areas, and of which I give below some numerical results, offer some interesting features. At a first glance one is struck with the very large total amount of species crowded upon so small an island, which all navigators depict as apparently so bleak and bare;—with the tropical character of the great majority of species, when botanists agree in representing the general aspect (derived from the majority of individuals) to present the features of a much more northern latitude;—with the large proportion of arborescent and shrubby species, on a rocky mass where the woods are limited to a few ravines or short narrow valleys half-monopolized by cultivation;—and with the very great diversity in the species themselves, the proportion of orders and genera to species, the comparative number of monotypic genera, being far greater in the Hongkong Flora than in that of any other Flora