Island In Europe Research Articles

The Hordeum murinum Complex in Australia

Barley grass (in Australia usually called Hordeum leporinum Link) was collected at 88 sites in South Australia and Victoria and grown at Northfield, near Adelaide, S.A. Time to Aowering was noted and each line was identified taxonomically. Specimens from the Australian herbaria were examined. The material was shown to belong to the three species within the Hordeum murinum complex. H. murinum L. itself is restricted to near Hobart, Tasmania, but H. leporinum grows widely through the wetter parts of southern Australia: it seems to grow commonly as far north as Sydney, and in South Australia and Victoria where the rainfall exceeds c. 425 mm. H. glaucum Steud., the third species in the complex and not previously recorded in Australia, was shown to be the common barley grass in the semiarid zone of the southern States (<425 mm of rain), and in wetter regions in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. Both H. leporinum and H. glaucum showed wide ecotypic variation in regard to flowering time, and this was related to length of growing season in South Australia and Victoria. The relationship was closest in H. leporinum. The first specimens of both H. leporinum and H. glaucum were collected in the 1840s and 1850s. Thus both species were introduced into Australia well before the Suez Canal opened in 1869. This eliminates the eastern Mediterranean as a direct source of the H. murinum complex even though the European distribution of one member, H. glaucum, is apparently limited to that region. Four other possible origins-England, the Atlantic coast and islands of Europe and north Africa, South Africa, and India-are discussed in relation to the distribution of the species and their opportunities for being introduced.

IV.—Some Considerations on the Probable Conditions under which the Paleozoic Rocks were Deposited over the Northern Hemisphere

Upper Silurian.—At the close of the Lower Silurian, as already stated, changes of considerable importance took place in some of the areas which had undergone depression. The sea-bottom was now raised in parts of Western Europe, and in North America, and islands of some extent formed. In Europe the most important were those in North Wales, Shropshire, Cumberland, the South of Scotland, and in Nassau. It is probable also that one or more extended along Southern Europe, from Portugal into Spain, etc., but the evidence concerning this is as yet imperfect. In America, according to Logan, Dana, etc., the principal parts raised at this time were the Green Mountain regions, and the ridge extending from Lake Erie over Cincinnati into Tennessee. These American ridges appear to have been raised to a great height, and to have remained afterwards in part dry land, even to the close of the Palœozoic. The islands in Europe were raised only to a small height above water-level, and were probably all again submerged by the close of the Upper Silurian.

The Phœnician Vademecum

IT is gratifying to see (vol. vii. p. 351) that you express a doubt whether the Cowrie shells in the Pomeranian barrows must necessarily, as Wagner supposes, have been brought by the Phœnicians. Because the earliest Greek historians introduced the Phœnicians to us they have been employed as a universal machinery for carrying out all kinds of operations. This theory is in fact incompatible with our present knowledge of the duration of the human race, and, we may say, with the relative antiquity of the Phœnician epoch, which can date but little beyond the historic period. Thus we are led to neglect the evidences of skulls, weapons, tools, monuments, and languages, which show that there must have been communications between distant regions long before the rise of the Phœnicians. There are many prehistoric races which had a sufficiently wide distribution to provide for the dissemination of such a small object as the Cowrie. Among these may be named the dwarf or short races, of which the Mincopies of the Audamans are a type; the race now represented by the Agavs of the Nile, Avkhass of Caucasus (Achivi), and Omagua and Guarani of Brazil; and the Dravidian race. Populations which could distribute men over the continents and islands of Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Americas must have been capable of distributing cowries and beads without Phœnician intervention. At present the Phœnicians are blocking the road to prehistoric research, as the Hebrews formerly did.