creation how the possibility of migration (without we suppose, with
extreme improbability, that each species with an Indo-Asiatic character
has actually travelled from the Asiatic shores, where such species do
not now exist) explains this Asiatic character in the plants of the
Pacific. This is no more obvious than that (as before remarked) there
should exist a relation between the creation of closely allied species
in several regions of the world, and the fact of many such species
having wide ranges; and on the other hand, of allied species confined to
one region of the world having in that region narrow ranges.

{359} "The affinities of the St Helena flora are strongly South
African." Hooker's _Lecture on Insular Floras_ in the _Gardeners'
Chronicle_, Jan. 1867.

{360} It is impossible to make out the precise form which the
author intended to give to this sentence, but the meaning is clear.

{361} This is no doubt true, the flora of the Sandwich group
however has marked American affinities.

_Alpine Floras._

We will now turn to the floras of mountain-summits which are well known
to differ from the floras of the neighbouring lowlands. In certain
characters, such as dwarfness of stature, hairiness, &c., the species
from the most distant mountains frequently resemble each other,--a kind
of analogy like that for instance of the succulency of most desert
plants. Besides this analogy, Alpine plants present some eminently
curious facts in their distribution. In some cases the summits of
mountains, although immensely distant from each other, are clothed by
the same identical species{362} which are likewise the same with those
growing on the likewise very distant Arctic shores. In other cases,
although few or none of the species may be actually identical, they are
closely related; whilst the plants of the lowland districts surrounding
the two mountains in question will be wholly dissimilar. As
mountain-summits, as far as their plants are concerned, are islands
rising out of an ocean of land in which the Alpine species cannot live,
nor across which is there any known means of transport, this fact
appears directly opposed to the conclusion which we have come to from
considering the general distribution of organisms both on continents and
on islands--namely, that the degree of relationship between the
inhabitants of two points depends on the completeness and nature of the
barriers betwe