A description is given in [Chapter XXXII] of the enormous amount of vegetable drift brought down by the Guayaquil River to the coast of Ecuador. Besides the huge tree-trunks and the floating Pistias, we observe large islets formed mainly of Pontederias and Polygonum, together with a host of seeds and seed-vessels, both large and small, including those of Anona paludosa, Entada scandens, Erythrina, Hibiscus tiliaceus, Ipomœa, Mucuna, Vigna, &c., accompanied by the empty seeds of Phytelephas macrocarpa and of many other strange plants from the slopes of the Chimborazo mountains. In addition, we notice the seedlings of Avicennia and of Rhizophora mangle together with the seeded joints of Salicornia peruviana and the germinating fruits of Laguncularia.

When in Fiji I made an especial study of the drift of the Rewa Estuary within tidal influence, the results of which are incorporated in various parts of this work. In the rainy season, when the drift is most abundant, the following would be its most characteristic components:

Amongst other seeds and fruits brought down by the Fijian rivers and stranded with a large amount of miscellaneous vegetable débris on the beaches in the vicinity of the estuaries are the seeds of Dioclea, Strongylodon lucidum, and Afzelia bijuga; the empty seeds of Musa Ensete (as identified with a query at Kew); the empty stones of the Sea tree, apparently a species of Spondias; the seeds of Colubrina asiatica; the fruits of an inedible indigenous Orange (Citrus vulgaris?) referred to in [Chapter XIII]; the cocci of Excæcaria Agallocha and Macaranga; and Coco-nuts.

The occurrence in Fijian beach-drift of the seeds of Musa Ensete, or of a wild banana much like it, is very remarkable. This species is found in the mountains of Abyssinia and on the slopes of Kilima-njaro in Equatorial Africa; but according to the monograph by Schumann on the Musaceæ (Engler’s Pflanzenreich, 1900) the species is confined to Africa, whilst all the other species of the subgenus are mostly restricted to the same continent with the exception of one or two in Further India. The empty seeds are frequent on the beach at Duniua at the mouth of the Ndreke-ni-wai in Savu-savu Bay, Vanua Levu, and are doubtless brought down by that river. Strangely enough the natives could give me no information about the parent plant which I never discovered. The seeds did not come under my notice in any other locality in Fiji. They answer to the description and to the figure given by Schumann for Musa Ensete; and their presence in the drift is one of the mysteries of the Pacific floras.

To enumerate the seeds and fruits found stranded on beaches in Fiji would be to give a list of all the littoral plants with buoyant seeds or fruits that are included in the list given in [Note 2]. I may here allude to the fact that the Coco-nut, whether brought down by a river or transported by a current, is able to germinate and establish itself when washed up on the Fijian beaches. I have found these fruits germinating amongst the drift stranded on the beaches near the mouths of rivers, some just beginning to germinate and others already striking into the sand and showing the first leaves. White residents living for years in one locality were quite convinced that this frequently happens. One of them pointed out to me some newly formed land at a river’s mouth, not over two years old, on which were growing young plants three or four feet high of Barringtonia speciosa, Calophyllum Inophyllum, and several other plants including young Coco-nut palms, all growing from fruits washed up by the waves and therefore self-sown.

Like the littoral flora the beach-drift proper to the Hawaiian Islands is very scanty. This is due to the scarcity of rivers, to the absence of the mangrove-formation from which much of the drift is derived in other tropical regions, and to the paucity of shore-plants with buoyant seeds or fruits. As is observed in [Note 30], where the composition of the beach drift is described, the presence of a large amount of timber and of other materials brought by the currents from the north-west coast of America masks much of the local drift.

Remarks on the beach-drift of the Panama Isthmus, and of the Ecuadorian, Peruvian, and Chilian coasts of South America will be found in [Chapter XXXII.] I have examined beach drift in other tropical regions, as in the Solomon group, on Keeling Atoll, and on the south coast of West Java; whilst there are at my disposal the data supplied by Schimper and Penzig for the Malayan region including Krakatoa, and by Hemsley for tropical regions generally. It will, I think, be best, if instead of describing in detail the composition of the drift for each locality, I refer briefly to the features that distinguish the tropical beach-drift of the Old World from that of the New World.

The beach-drift reflects the characters of the coast flora; and since tropical littoral floras belong to two great regions, the Asiatic including Polynesia and the African East Coast, and the American including the African West Coast, the seeds and fruits stranded on the beaches may be similarly referred to the same two regions.

All over tropical Asia, as well as in the tropical islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the drift stranded on the beach presents the same general character, and as a rule possesses seeds and fruits of the same species that range over the whole or the greater part of this region. Almost everywhere we find seeds or fruits of the same plants of the beach formation, such as Barringtonia speciosa, Cæsalpinia Bonducella, Calophyllum Inophyllum, Canavalia obtusifolia, Cerbera Odollam, Cordia subcordata, Entada scandens, Guettarda speciosa, Hernandia peltata, Hibiscus tiliaceus, Ipomœa pes capræ, Mucuna, Scævola Kœnigii, Sophora tomentosa, Terminalia Katappa, and Tournefortia argentea. In those localities where mangrove-swamps occur we find generally diffused in the stranded drift of this region the seedlings of Bruguiera and Rhizophora, the seeds of Carapa moluccensis, the fruits of Heritiera littoralis and Lumnitzera coccinea, and the pods of Derris uliginosa. Amongst sundries found over much of this region may be mentioned, the drupes of Pandanus, the seeds of Erythrina, Vigna lutea, and Hibiscus tiliaceus, and the “nuts” of Aleurites moluccana. With the exception of the last-named all the fruits and seeds here enumerated are effectively dispersed by currents over great areas. The sound nuts of Aleurites have no buoyancy; and the nuts only acquire their floating power through the decay of the kernel (see p. [419]).