Touchardia 1 Urticaceae. 38. Neraudia 2 ,, ---- Total 254 species. The great preponderance of the two orders Compositae and Lobeliaceae are what first strike us in this list. In the former case the facilities for wind-dispersal afforded by the structure of so many of the seeds render it comparatively easy to account for their having reached the islands at an early period. The Lobelias, judging from Hildebrand's descriptions, may have been transported in several {328} different ways. Most of the endemic genera are berry-bearers and thus offer the means of dispersal by fruit-eating birds. The endemic species of the genus Lobelia have sometimes very minute seeds, which might be carried long distances by wind, while other species, especially Lobelia gaudichaudii, have a "hard, almost woody capsule which opens late," apparently well adapted for floating long distances. Afterwards "the calycine covering withers away, leaving a fenestrate woody network" enclosing the capsule, and the seeds themselves are "compressed, reniform, or orbicular, and margined," and thus of a form well adapted to be carried to great heights and distances by gales or hurricanes. In the other orders which present several endemic genera indications of the mode of transit to the islands are afforded us. The Araliaceae are said to have fleshy fruits or drupes more or less succulent. The Rubiaceae have usually berries or drupes, while one genus, Kadua, has "small, flat, winged seeds." The two largest genera of the Labiatae are said to have "fleshy nucules," which would no doubt be swallowed by birds.[78] _Antiquity of the Hawaiian Fauna and Flora._--The great antiquity implied by the peculiarities of the fauna and flora, no less than by the geographical conditions and surroundings, of this group, will enable us to account for another peculiarity of its flora--the absence of so many families found in other Pacific Islands. For the earliest immigrants would soon occupy much of the surface, and become specially modified in accordance with the conditions of the locality, and these would serve as a barrier against the intrusion of many forms which at a later {329} period spread over Polynesia. The extreme remoteness of the islands, and the probability that they have always been more isolated than those of the Central Pacific, would also necessarily result in an imperfect and fragmentary representation of the flora of surrounding lands.