The winds at the camp were extremely variable and local from north and south, usually light, with force 1-3: see under Winds and Clouds in the text.
Rain fell on six days, total 30⁄100 of an inch: but on four of the days it was not measurable.
NOTE 62 (page [222])
On the Relative Proportion of Vascular Cryptogams in Fiji
According to Seemann’s work, where about 617 indigenous flowering plants and about 195 ferns and lycopods are enumerated, the vascular cryptogams would form about 24 per cent. of the whole flora. (All weeds and cultivated plants are here excluded.) The vascular cryptogams, however, seem to figure too prominently in Seemann’s collections. From Horne’s data, who says that he added 363 flowering plants to the flora, the flowering plants would amount to about 980; and since Baker implies, in Trimen’s Journal of Botany, 1879, that Horne added 42 species of ferns and lycopods to the flora, this would increase the vascular cryptogams to 237, which enables us to estimate the relative proportion of vascular cryptogams in Fiji as about 20 per cent. of the whole flora of vascular plants. This is probably near the truth.
NOTE 63 (page [222])
On the Table of Vascular Cryptogams of Tahiti, Hawaii, and Fiji
In the case of Tahiti, I have gone carefully through the list given by Drake del Castillo, comparing it with other Polynesian lists given by Seemann, Horne, Hillebrand, Hemsley, &c., and have reduced his endemic species from 19 to 13. The same thing has been done with Hillebrand’s list for Hawaii, some of his species having been found in other parts of Polynesia, thus reducing the endemic species from 75 to 70. The data relating to Fiji are referred to in [Note 62].
NOTE 64 (page [223])
On the Distribution of the Tahitian Ferns and Lycopods
I have arranged them as follows, according to the distributions given by Drake del Castillo:—Cosmopolitan, 5; Tropics of Old and New Worlds, 33; Tropics of Old World, mainly Indo-Malaya, 58; “Océanie,” including Australia, 17; Polynesia, 26; South America, 2; peculiar to Tahiti, 13: total, 154.
Out of 141 non-endemic Tahitian species, 107 at least have been recorded from the Fijian area comprising Samoa and Tonga, and 42 from Hawaii. Of the last, all but four occur also in Fiji. There is thus a very small element peculiar to Hawaii and Tahiti alone. Some of them will no doubt be found in the Fijian area; whilst two of them, Acrostichum squamosum and Lycopodium venustulum, are high-mountain forms in Hawaii and Tahiti, which have evidently failed to find a suitable elevation in Fiji.