Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/529

Rh the flowering plants of this most interesting part of Jamaica by Messrs. William Fawcett and William Harris, of the staff. Diligent search for new forms in the more inaccessible regions was made especially by Mr. Harris, while G. L. Jenman, then superintendent of Castleton Gardens, studied the ferns of this area. Hundreds of species of mosses, ferns and seed plants new to the island, and to science, were found by these workers. The Flora of Jamaica, now being published by Fawcett and Rendle from the British Museum, was initiated at Cinchona. Records were also made for twenty years of the temperature and rainfall at several stations in this region, including Blue Mountain Peak, at 7,423 feet elevation.

Some sixteen years ago the staff was removed to new headquarters at Hope Gardens, near Kingston, from which the lowland agriculture, now of most importance to the island, can be more readily studied and aided. For a number of years after the removal of headquarters, the Cinchona Station was not occupied, except occasionally as a summer retreat from the heat of the plains, by the governor, or other island officials, or by visiting botanists. For example, it was used as a base for botanical work by Campbell in 1897, by Harshberger in 1902, and by Underwood, Maxon, Johnson and Shreve in 1903.

The importance of the later history of Cinchona, during its lease by the New York Botanical Garden, has already been suggested. Aside from being used as a propagating station, it has been the base for much purely botanical work by Americans and Englishmen. Researches have come from Cinchona during the past decade by workers from the New York Botanical Garden, the United States National Museum, Columbia, Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities, and Wellesley College. Important studies of the ecological distribution of Blue Mountain plants have been made here by Forrest Shreve, of Johns Hopkins University and of the Carnegie Institution. Developmental and anatomical investigations have been initiated at Cinchona on the Orchidaceae, Piperaceae, Loranthaceae, Filicales and Hepaticeae by investigators from Columbia, Glasgow, Johns Hopkins and Yale Universities. Aside from the investigations accomplished, many botanists have here had their first opportunity of perceiving the intimate dependence of certain types of extreme specialization in plant structure on the accentuation of definite climatic or edaphic conditions. In other words, many have here first seen ferns and seed plants living as epiphytes, and have first appreciated the extreme diversity of habit and complexity of composition attained by the plant life of a primeval forest under tropical conditions.

The Cinchona Station of to-day consists in the first place of the residence, a bungalow. This, with an adjoining building, can furnish