Abstract
I FEAR that in attempting to compress into a few paragraphs a general sketch of the plant communities of New Zealand I inadvertently conveyed the erroneous impression concerning the distribution of the mangrove vegetation in Australasia which Mr. W. B. Alexander has corrected in his interesting note. The sentence which he quotes is perhaps less misleading if read in connection with that immediately preceding it, and containing the statement upon which I wished to lay chief stress in enumerating the main types of New Zealand vegetation—“to find an equal variety a continent extending to the tropics would have to be visited”. I was quite aware of the well-known fact that the eastern or Indo-Malayan mangrove flora, well developed on the northern littoral of Australia, extends in an impoverished form along the eastern and western coasts southwards, though it is interesting to note that it actually reaches the most southerly point of the Australian continent. It may be added that Prof. Bews (Annals Natal Museum, ii., 1912, p. 297) has recently described what appears to be the most southerly extension of the mangrove vegetation on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean, in Durban Bay; here, as in the subtropical and warm temperate parts of Australasia, the rich eastern mangrove flora is represented by an interesting though poorly developed outlier consisting of Avicennia officinalis, Bruguiera gymnorhiza, and Rhizophora mucronata.
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C., F. [Letters to Editor]. Nature 91, 399 (1913). https://doi.org/10.1038/091399b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/091399b0
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