|24||Mr. Brown, on the Proteaceae of Jussieu.|
the African species; and my friend Mr. Ferdinand Bauer has observed a similar tendency in Protea mellifera.
Among the New Holland species, Banksia speciosa is the sole instance, and even that only in certain circumstances, of this manner of growth.
The favourite station of Proteaceæ is in dry stony exposed places, especially near the shores, where they occur also, though more rarely, in loose sand. Scarcely any of them require shelter, and none a good soil. A few are found in wet bogs, or even in shallow pools of fresh water; and one, the Embothrium ferrugineum of Cavanilles, grows, according to him, in salt marshes.
Respecting the height to which plants of this order ascend, a few facts are already known. The authors of the Flora Peruviana mention, in general terms, several species as being alpine; and Humboldt, in his valuable Chart of Æquinoctial Botany, has given the mean height of Embothrium emarginatum about 9300 feet, assigning it a range of only 300 feet. On the summits of the mountains of Van Diemen's Island, in about 43° south latitude, at the computed height of about 4000 feet, I have found species of Embothrium, as well as other genera hitherto observed in no other situation. Embothrium, however, as it is the most southern genus of any extent, so it is also, as might have been presumed, the most alpine of the family.
Two genera only of this order are found in more than one continent: Rhopala, the most northern genus, which, though chiefly occurring in America, is to be met with also in Cochin-china and in the Malay Archipelago; and Embothrium, the most southern genus of any extent, is common to New Holland and America.