Page:Journal of botany, British and foreign, Volume 34 (1896).djvu/19

A PRELIMINARY LIST OF MALDIVE PLANTS. 3 this land-form was found in considerable abundance, no examples approaching Dr. Tiselius's specimens, No. 44, d., e., and/., were to be seen. I have to thank Mr. Morgan once more for the great pains he has taken in drawing his two accurate plates of this plant. The limited space of an 8vo plate did not admit the insertion of the characteristic involute stem-leaves ; a drawing was prepared in which these were fully shown, but we thought it better to figure the autumnal barren shoot and the land-form in the second plate, especially as the involute leaves may easily be understood from the description. Tab. 353 represents a flowering branch. Tab. 354, fig. 1, the land-form ; and fig. 2, a barren autumnal shoot. A PKELIMINARY LIST OF MALDIVE PLANTS. By Henry Trimen, M.B., F.R.S. Since the year 1888, I have had in my possession a small collection of plants collected on Male I. by Capt. A. C. Christopher, A.D.C. to Sir A. Gordon (now Lord Stanmore, at that time Governor of Ceylon), who visited the Maldives in a ship of war. I have always hoped to be able to add to it by personal investigation on the spot, but this now seems unlikely. A few species were added by some scraps picked up by Mr. Haly, Director of the Colombo Museum, in 1892 ; but, so far as I know, no collector with any botanical knowledge has visited the Archipelago, nor are there any specimens from it in our London herbariums. Also, with the ex- ception of a few notices of some plants cultivated in the islands, I believe nothing has been published on their vegetation. In- complete and meagre as it is, I therefore think it may be worth while to put on record the following list, as embodying what is known up to the present on the subject. A full general account of the Maldive group will be found in the Report of Mr. H. C. P. Bell, of the Ceylon Civil Service, who visited Male in 1879, in the official Ceylon *' Sessional Papers" for. 1881 (but not published till 1883). Unfortunately he did not collect plants, but he brought back a few scraps which were examined by the late Mr. W. Ferguson, F.L.S., of Colombo, who was, however, only able to identify two or three of them. The Maldives are coral islands, and form a large archipelago extending from 7° 6' N. lat. to a little south of the equator, 0° 42' S. lat. There are more than twenty atols in all, the most northerly being 350 miles from Cape Comorin, in India, and 400 from the nearest point of the Ceylon coast. There are said to be at least 1200 islands, but many are very small. The principal island, con- taining Mal^, the capital, is one mile long by three-quarters of a mile broad, and I believe that it is on this alone that any plants have been collected. The inhabitants, probably originally of the B 2