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Show A. NOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 309 ably shown from his own observation in his Antarctic Flora. The three islands of which New Zealand consists extend from 3H0 to 47t0 S. latitude; and as they contain, moreover, snowy mountains of above 50 English feet elevation, they must include considerable diver ity of climate. The Northern Island has been examined with tolerable completeness from the voyage of Banks and Solander to Le son and the Brothers Cunningham and Colenso, and yet in more than 70 years we have only become acquainted with less than 700 phrenogamous species. (Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand, 1 43, vol. i. p. 419.) The paucity of vegetable corresponds to the paucity of animal species. Joseph Hooker, in his Flora Antarctica, pp. 73-75, remarks, that "the botany of the densely wooded regions of the southern islands of the New Zealand group and of Fuegia is much more meagre not only than that of similarly clothed regions of Europe, but of islands many degrees nearer to the Northern pole than these are to the Southern one. Iceland, for instance, which is from 8 to 10 degrees farther from the Equator than the Auckland and the Campbell Islands, contains certainly five times as many flowering plants. In the Antarctic Flora, under the influence of a cool and moist, but singularly equable climate, great uniformity, arising from paucity of pecies, is associated with great luxuriance of vegetation. This striking uniformity prevails both at different levels (the species found on the plains appearing also on the slopes of the mountains) and over vast extents of country, from the south of Chili to Patagonia and even to Tierra del Fuego, or from lat. 45° to 56°. Compare, on the other hand, in the northern temperate region, the Flora of the South of France, in the latitude of the Chonos Archipelago on the coast of Chili, with the Flora of Argyleshire in Scotland, in the latitude of Cape Horn, and how great a difference of species is found; while in the southern hemisphere the same types of vegetation pass through many degrees of latitude. La tly, on Walden Island, in lat. 80to N., or not ten degrees from the North Pole of the earth, ten species of flowering plants ha>e been collected, while in the southernmost islet of the South Shetlands, though only in lat. 63° S., only a solitary grass was found." These considerations on the distribution of plants confirm the belief that the great mass of still unobserved, uncollected, and undescribed |