# Memoirs of Travel, Sport and Natural History/Chapter 16

Memoirs of Travel, Sport and Natural History by Henry John Elwes was first published in London in 1930, and edited by Edward G. Hawke
CHAPTER XVI
CHILE, 1901–1902
My journey to Chile had three main objects. The first was to gain some idea of the peculiar conditions which make the fauna and flora of Chile so interesting. The second was to collect as many as possible of the lepidoptera, which have never been studied on the spot by any competent entomologist. Thirdly, I wished to learn something about the many beautiful plants of Chile which we grow in gardens and of whose habitat we know but little, and to introduce to cultivation the terrestrial orchids which are such a marked feature in the flora of the country.
I was fairly successful in all these objects, and brought back a collection of plants which have been worked out at Kew by Mr. T.A. Sprague, Mr. Rolfe and myself.
Though many good naturalists have travelled in Chile,yet for the most part their explorations have been confined to the settled parts of the country. There is a large region in what was formerly called Araucania which, having only lately become open to travellers, has remained comparatively unknown to European naturalists, though it has now been fairly well explored by the numerous surveyors who have been employed by the Chilean and Argentine Governments to settle the boundary dispute, which at the time of my visit had become a very burning question. Among these Señor Moreno on the Argentine side, and Dr. Hans Stiffen on the Chilean side, are by far the most distinguished.
I need not enumerate the various authors who have written on the natural history of Chile. The names of Gay, Philippi, Cunningham, Darwin and Ball are all well known. The two former have described the natural history of the interior of the country, whilst our countrymen have studied the coast in a way which I cannot hope to equal, as it is evident that three months in such a country as Chile would by no means justify me in forming any very decided opinions about the causes which have produced such a remarkable fauna and flora. So far as Darwin saw the country, he describes it in a manner which makes it difficult to add anything of importance to what he wrote. But he saw little of the southern mountains, which in his time were almost unknown to the Chileans themselves. I shall therefore pass over the regions which he so well described, and confine my remarks principally to the route between Mulchen and Puerto Montt, which has never been described by any scientific traveller except in part by Señor Moreno.
I left England in November, 1901, and arrived at Buenos Ayres on December and, when the political relations between Chile and Argentina were in a condition which almost led to war, and which delayed me considerably in making a start for the southern frontier. I had engaged the assistance of a Swedish engineer, Señor Arneberg, but on arriving in Chile I was advised that it might be unwise to travel with a man who had been employed by the Argentine Government as surveyor. After a months delay in Chile I was fortunate in obtaining the assistance of ​Mr. Bartlett Calvert, an English entomologist long resident at Quillota, whose intimate knowledge of the language made it possible for me to organise my camp without any serious difficulties. I received every facility from the Argentine and Chilean Governments in the way of passports, for which I have to express my gratitude to the ministers of both countries, as well as to many kind friends in Chile who did everything in their power to assist my undertaking, and whose hospitality was far beyond what I had ever previously experienced in any country where I travelled.
From Buenos Ayres to Santiago was now an easy railway journey of three days, broken only by the pass over the Andes between Puente del Inca and Salto de Soldado, which was traversed in one day on muleback with perfect ease and safety. This journey has been so well described in recent works by Fitzgerald and Sir M. Conway that I need only say that the good hotel at Puente del Inca, at the foot of the great mountain of Aconcagua, affords a delightful resting-place. The few butterflies which I found there seemed to show that there is considerable resemblance between the high Andes in this latitude and the Bolivian Andes, which have been so well explored by Garlepp, and whose lepidoptera have well been described by Staudinger in Iris, VII., p. 43.
After visiting the museum at Santiago, where Dr. Philippi was good enough to allow me to leave my collections to be dried, I first went to the Baños de Cauquenes, which have been described by Darwin and the late John Ball, who visited Chile in 1882 and wrote a book on his journey. The season for plants was here already advanced and the country very dry, but I saw enough to convince me that the evergreen forest which clothes the mountains and extends into the plain farther south had never been present in the outer valleys of the Andes here, though about six hours' ride into the mountains brings you to a valley where Libocedrus chilensis, the Chilean "cypress," grows abundantly. The magnificent Puya cærulea (or alpestris), which Miss North has so beautifully painted, was the most striking plant I saw, but orchids were conspicuous by their absence.
I next visited Concepcion and the beautiful gardens of the late Madame Cousino at Lota, also described by Mr. Ball, where I saw for the first time on the hillsides some of the South Chilean plants, and where large plantations of the Californian Pinus insignis are rapidly changing the aspect of the country. Nothing is more surprising in the great central valley of Chile along the line of the railway than the way in which the indigenous vegetation is being supplanted by trees and plants introduced from Europe. The weeping willows are finer than I ever saw in Europe. Lombardy poplars form avenues along most of the country roads and surround many of the irrigated fields, in which wheat, lucerne, vines and beans grow with wonderful luxuriance, and which, when fallow, are smothered with gigantic thistles and other South European weeds. European oaks, peaches, figs and introduced conifers have so changed the aspect of the settled and cultivated parts of the country that one would suppose oneself to be in Italy rather than in South America. In the beautiful gardens and fruit plantations of Señor Salvador Isquierdo at Santa Inez, I saw ​that with skill and enterprise Chile will soon rival California as a fruitgrowing country, and at Quillota some tropical fruits may be grown in addition.
Agriculture in Chile has been fostered by the establishment of a college at Santiago, which in its equipment surpasses anything we have in England. And though old-fashioned methods are still in vogue in the haciendas of the country, many of the enlightened landowners of Chile are devoting themselves to the improvement of their estates in a way which will bring its own reward.
My next trip was to the Baths of Chilian, sixty miles east of the town of that name, and situated in a forest-clad tract of mountains at the foot of the Nevada de Chilian at an elevation of about 6,000 feet. Here I collected many beautiful plants and insects, and saw the beech forests, which here clothe the mountains from the plains up to about 6,000 feet, in all their glory.
As this is the only place where comfortable accommodation can be obtained at a high elevation in an accessible part of the Andes south of the Mendoza Pass, the Baths of Chilian have been visited by several naturalists, though much remains to be discovered. I collected a large number of the curious terrestrial orchids of the genus Chlorœa, which grow here and which were first discovered and described by Poeppig in the valley of Antuco, whose volcanic peak can be seen to the southward from the mountains round the Baths of Chilian. I very much doubt, however, whether we shall succeed in cultivating them successfully as their long fleshy roots are so deeply buried in the sand and stones among the roots of bushes and a bamboo-like grass, Chusquea andina, that they are very difficult to get up without injury. And as they grow most abundantly at an elevation where they are covered by snow during the English summer and flower in brilliant sunshine and a dry air at the time when our English winter is at its worst, the conditions are very hard to deal with. Those which I sent to Kew from the coast region about Concepcion are, however, growing fairly at Kew, and their beauty and interest are so great that every effort should be made to flower them. Some of the species found here at 5,000 to 7,000 feet elevation, as for instance Pogonia tetraphylla, extend south to the Straits of Magellan, where they grow at sea-level, and there are many other plants, and some birds and insects, which have the same great range of distribution.
Having obtained nearly all the butterflies which were found at this place by Mr. Edmonds, and which were described by Butler in 1883, I returned to Santiago and found that the immediate risk of war was over and it was now possible to start on my journey along the frontier to Lake Nahuelhuapi. President Barros of the Santiago University advised me to go to his brother-in-law Mr. Bussey, an English gentleman who had married a Chilean lady, and who lived at the Hacienda de San Ignacio, a part of the great Puelma property which extends from Mulchen nearly up to the Lonquimai pass, now the principal route by which the cattle and sheep from the Argentine frontier ranches as far south as the Rio Limay are brought to market at Victoria. I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to the members of this most charming and amiable ​family, especially to Señora Bussey and her brothers for the great kindness they showed me when seized by a severe choleraic attack, and for the assistance they gave me in engaging men, mules and outfit for what was looked on even then as a somewhat venturesome journey.
I first went as far south as Victoria, Temuco and Tolten, which was then the end of the great southern railway, to be connected soon with Valdivia and Puerto Montt. Here I saw the way in which the great southern forest of Araucania was being rapidly converted into wheatfields and grazing grounds, largely by German immigrants. I made the acquaintance of two timber merchants, Mr. Smith, a Canadian, and Herr von Voden, a German, who gave me much valuable information about the timber resources of the forests of Southern Chile, which are already supplying railway sleepers to Argentina, and which, if properly conserved, will be one day one of the greatest sources of wealth in the country.
At San Ignacio I was detained ten days, partly by illness, and only succeeded in making a start for the frontier on January 22nd.
The forest has been to a great extent cleared for wheat cultivation from a point a little east of Mulchen up to the foot of the mountains, but in the valley of the Renaico river, which I followed from San Ignacio lip to its source in the Sierra de Pemehue, I found a great many of the plants which are peculiar to South Chile, and which require a moist climate. Among these may be mentioned the beautiful climber Lapageria rosea, one of the greatest ornaments of English greenhouses; Eucryphia pinnatifida, a very handsome white-flowered shrub which ripens seed in the South of England; and Embothrum coccineum, a shrub which grows in Cornwall to a greater size than I ever saw it attain in Chile.
This was the first place where ferns were a conspicuous feature in the flora, and covered the wet rocks on the river bank in company with Gunnera chilensis, which, though it becomes a conspicuous feature in the scenery further south, is only found in Central Chile in swamps and places where moisture is constant.
Our journey for the first six days was of surpassing beauty and interest, leading over the Sierra de Pemehue, a range which, though not exceeding 7,000 to 8,000 feet in elevation, is a more striking feature in the orography than the true Cordillera is in this latitude, and is covered with splendid forests of beech and Araucaria. We stopped at Lolco, a large grazing farm near the Biobio river, which is the longest if not the largest river in Chile, and, crossing a pass of about 7,000 feet, where I found many beautiful Alpine plants and a butterfly which very closely resembles a species from the high mountains of New Zealand, descended to the frontier settlement of Lonquimai. Here the Chilean custom house is situated about fifty miles east of Victoria, and a long day's ride up the Biobio valley from the actual frontier at Los Arcos. The scenery about here changes completely and begins to show a dryer type of vegetation, resembling that of the Argentine territory on the east side of the watershed. The broad, open, upper valley of the Biobio is covered with grass, bushes and an umbelliferous plant called "Yerba negra," Mulinum spinosum Pers, which is very abundant and characteristic of the frontier region ​from Lolco to Nahuelhuapi. On these grassy downs the beautiful silver butterfly, Argyrophorus argenteus Blanch., is a most conspicuous ornament, flying rapidly in the high wind which usually prevails a few hours after sunrise. It is unique in its coloration among the Lepidoptera, though belonging to the Satyridæ which are all over the world characterised by brown, black and rufous tints.
In the dense shady forest of the Sierra de Pemehue is found another butterfly belonging to the Hesperidæ, Cyclopides Puelmæ Calv., which is also unique in its coloration, being of a bright shining golden colour. Though usually settling on the green leaves of the tall bamboo-like grass, Chusquea, which in many places forms a dense and almost impassable underwood in these forests, it often lights on the brilliant golden flowers of Alstrœmeria aurantiaca Don., which is extremely abundant not only in the forest but also in the open.
It seems to me that any attempt to account for such abnormal coloration in isolated cases like these by any theories of protective coloration or otherwise is hopeless in the present state of our knowledge.
From Los Arcos, where we found a small outpost of Argentine cavalry, we travelled through a beautiful country at an average elevation of 3,000 to 5,000 feet covered with scattered groves of Araucaria and beech interspersed with grassy downs and stony hills, some of which had flat tops and basaltic columnar sides, past Lake Alumine to Pulmari, and then down the Alumine valley to the Quillen river. Mutisias were the most beautiful flowers in this part of the country, and at the higher elevations assumed a dwarf Alpine form quite different from their long and straggling growth over bushes in the lower parts of the country.
Mutisia is a genus which will require much study before the so-called species can be discriminated in a satisfactory manner. They seem to vary immensely according to the elevation and situation, and I should not like to say that all that have been named by various botanists are good species.
By far the handsomest from a horticultural point of view is the wellknown M. decurrens, which, though long known in cultivation, has proved a most difficult and disappointing plant in English gardens. In the lower parts of the country it forms a straggling climber of which the lower part loses its leaves as the top extends, and rarely makes a good show of its splendid flowers. The finest form of it was on the edges of the clearings on an island in Lake Nahuelhuapi. On the mountains south of Lake Alumine it becomes an Alpine plant growing with a stem apparently herbaceous and only two to three feet high at an elevation of 5,000 feet or more, and as in the last days of January (midsummer) it froze here at night, it must be a very hardy plant.
Though I took great trouble to procure good seed of the Mutisias, and dismounted at least fifty times when I saw a likely looking plant, I was unsuccessful in getting any seed that would germinate.
Birds were not numerous and, though Condors were occasionally seen at a distance, they appear to be very much less common than Darwin found them. I only once got near enough to a Condor to distinguish the ruff round the neck, and never got a shot at one. A few Thinocorus, a few snipe and ducks, a single pair of black-necked swans, and an occasional flock of the ​large brown Ibis, Theristicus caudatus, which is common in many parts of Chile, were the most conspicuous. At rare intervals I saw a hummingbird, generally at high elevations. But though I began life as an ornithologist and still have a great interest in this study, it is impossible, when travelling on horseback and collecting plants and insects, to pay enough attention to birds to make one's observations of much value. And as the birds of Chile are fairly well known from the catalogue of them compiled by the late Mr. James and edited by Dr. Sclater, I have said but little about them.
Mammals are scarcer in Chile than in any country I ever visited. I do not think I saw six species during the whole of my journey. Guanacos are common further east wherever they are not too much hunted, but I only saw one small herd near Traful. Foxes are not rare, but seldom seen. Deer arc still found in the denser and more remote forests, and were formerly common on the upper Biobio valley, but I never saw even a track of the large Cervus chilensis, and only once surprised a small Pudu in the thick forest above San Martin, It scorns difficult to say what the Indians who formerly roved over this country lived on; for though the seeds of Araucaria are said to have formed the principal food of the tribes frequenting the restricted region where this tree grows, and the seedlings which have sprung upon the site of old camping grounds show that they carried them about as food, yet before the Spanish colonists introduced cattle it seems as though there could not have been fish, flesh or fowl sufficient to support more than a very few of them for a part of the year.
Dr. Moreno has studied the anthropology of the country so thoroughly that I will not say anything of the tribes. In a book which he published in French, Reconnaissance de la Région Andine (La Plata, 1898), he has given a good account of this part of the frontier illustrated by photographs which will tell far more about it than I can do, and the geology of the country is probably one of its most interesting and attractive features, of which I can say little or nothing.
I have never, however, in Europe, Asia or America, seen such curious and striking rock formations as we passed in the valley of Quillen, and on the march from San Martin to the Limay river, Some of these Mr. Calvert photographed, and though these photos fail to show the wonderful forms and colours of the rocks, they may attract a competent artist and geologist to a country which is full of beauty and interest, and as yet quite unknown to European naturalists.
From Lake Quillen we tried to return to the lowlands of Chile by a trail through the forest which is called the Pucon pass, and which leads down to the lake of Villarica, once a flourishing Spanish settlement which was destroyed by the Indians and whose site is now, as I hear, covered with what seems to be virgin forest.
Our guide, however, either did not know the road or purposely misled us, for, before reaching the frontier, which is here quite a low pass, the track became so much encumbered with fallen trees and the forest so dense that I had to turn back, I crossed from Lake Quillen to Junin de los Andes, near the sources of the Pichi Nahuelhuapi river, and after leaving ​this valley saw no more Araucarias. The range of the tree, therefore, seems a very narrow one, from about the Antuco valley in lat. 37 0 30' S. to about lat. 40° 30' S. I was told by one or two persons that an Araucaria is found in the neighbourhood of Lake Nahuelhuapi, and was in great hopes of discovering a new species or variety, but when I reached the Limay river I could hear nothing of such a tree. If any isolated groves or specimens of it exist so far south, I should suppose them to have been introduced by seeds dropped by the Indians, Libocedrus was the only coniferous tree I observed between Junin and the Limay river, and that never attains any great height.
Yet this remarkable tree, Araucaria imbricata, has been so imperfectly studied by modern travellers that I think the conditions under which it grows are worthy of being described fully.
Miss North, in her account of her Chilean journey, describes the Araucaria forest which exists on the coast range (called the Cordillera de Nahuelbuta) west of Angol in lat. 38°, where its habitat is completely isolated from the Andes,
Poeppig describes the conditions under which he saw it in the district of Antuco a little farther north, which appears to be almost, if not quite, its northerly limit. I first saw it at about 4,000 feet or a little lower on the Sierra de Pichinitron, in the upper part of the Renaico valley on the road from San Ignacio to Lolco in lat. 39°. Here it grew on exposed ridges sometimes mixed with beeches and sometimes alone, and did not attain such large dimensions as it does farther south. It seeds freely and in places where fire had not gone through the forest I found many young seedlings which appeared to grow at about the same rate as in England. Its bark is thick and rugged when old and is divided into large tabular bosses.
I did not see any old trees which had kept their lower branches; when old the tree has almost always a flat top formed by densely crowded branches near the summit, I should say that it attains a maximum height of ninety to a hundred feet and an average girth when adult of ten to twelve feet, but I measured one tree which was about twenty-four feet in circumference.
On February 5th, the weather, which had been almost uniformly clear, hot and windy, broke up, and we had several wet days after this which much interfered with my collecting. At Junin de los Andes we found Colonel Perez, commanding the 3rd Argentine Cavalry, who invited me to return with him to San Martin, a new military settlement at the east end of Lake Lacar, which was occupied by his regiment. The watershed which forms the frontier is here so ill-defined that I crossed it without being aware of the fact.
Near here there is a very striking volcanic peak called Lanin, which I had seen from several points on my route, and which is of great height (12,041 feet), but I was unable to visit it from want of time. The scenery round Lake Lacar is very beautiful and I have no doubt that San Martin will one day be a favourite resort in the Southern Andes. Though at an elevation of under 3,000 feet the winter climate is sometimes severe, and the snow lies so deep that in the first year that it was occupied by ​Colonel Perez's regiment they lost two hundred horses from want of fodder caused by the deep snow. Permanent barracks, however, are now built, and a large area of land has been brought into cultivation with lucerne to supply fodder. The officers of Colonel Perez's regiment showed us the greatest kindness and hospitality, and I have to thank this fine old frontier officer for much assistance on our journey.
The mountains round Lake Lacar are forest-clad and some of them run up to 6,000 or 7,000 feet, having the flora and aspect of Chile rather than of Argentina. On the Chapelco mountain I found several rare and interesting plants, among them an Oxalis Bustillosii (or adenophylla), which may be new and which has already flowered in my garden, and Ourisia Poeppigii Benth., of which a few seeds have also germinated; and on the Chapelco mountain above San Martin I have no doubt that other plants of great interest will be found.
The weather from here southwards became much wetter, and the vegetation had an autumnal aspect; but the meteorology of this region is so much affected by the presence or absence of high mountains to the west, which in some places cause the rainfall to vary very much in a short distance, that I should not like to say that there is any real change in the climate.
When we reached the point where the Limay river runs out of the great Lake Nahuelhuapi we were almost out of the mountains and on the edge of the great Patagonian pampa, whose natural history is pretty well known. I had intended to return to Buenos Ayres by boat down the Rio Limay as far as Confluenza, where it joins the Rio Negro, and where the present terminus of the railway was situated. But as the valley is already well described by Señor Moreno, and I heard that there was now an easy route to Puerto Montt in Chile, I decided to go that way and was very well pleased that I did so.
All the western and north-western shores of the lake are shut in by mountains rising to 5,000 or 6,000 feet, and covered with dense, almost impenetrable, forest, of which beech, cypress and Alerce (Fitzroya patagonica) are the principal trees. A saw mill has now been opened by an English firm to cut and float logs down the Rio Limay to Argentina, and there is a large ranch belonging to a well-known American settler, Señor Jones, on the north shore. I sold my horses and mules to his partner, Mr. Neil, who has a store on the banks of the lake where the Limay leaves it, and sent my Chilian servants back to Lonquimai, as I had not time to extend my journey southward to the Welsh settlement of Colonia de 16th Octubre, near the headwaters of the Chubut river.
As for the road to Puerto Montt, I do not think I have ever seen a route which in three or four days combines such varied features of beauty and interest to a naturalist. Starting from San Carlos on the south-east shore of Nahuelhuapi, we crossed the lake in a small steamer, and reached Puerto Blest at the head of a deep inlet on the south-west end of the lake.
FIG. 10.—CHILEAN CYPRESS ON THE BANKS OF THE RIVER UMAY.
The climate of Nahuelhuapi is a cold one in winter, much more so on the east shore (where Mr. Neil said the thermometer had fallen to −17° C. in winter) than on the islands, where the captain of the steamer, Herr Otto Muhlenpfordt, has a house, and had not registered more than 8° C. of frost. From Lago Frio we had a magnificent view of the great Tronador, one of the very finest mountains I have ever seen, for though not of any great height (between 11,000 and 12,000 feet) it is covered with glaciers which on the north-west side reach down to about 2,000 feel above sea-level, and its lower slopes are buried in an evergreen forest composed of the many beautiful trees and shrubs of South Chile.
From Lago Frio, which is passed in a row-boat, to Casapangue, the pass of Perez Rosales is crossed at an elevation of 1,150 metres as shown by the Chilean boundary pillar on its top. This pass is named after a Chilean governor who passed it in 1855. Here I found a very beautiful plant, Columnea ovata Cav., in flower on the rotten stumps and bases of trees in the dense shady forest, but could find no seed ripe enough to gather. I also caught several of the characteristic forest butterflies, nearly all Satyridæ and Hesperidæ, and descended about 2,500 feet through a forest which reminded me very much of the Sikkim Himalaya at about 6,000 to 7,000 feet.
At Casapangue is a good wooden house where the manager of Messrs. Hube and Achelis entertained us, and I would gladly have stayed there some days had time allowed. But as there were only two full days before the steamer was due at Puerto Montt, I had only time to visit the foot of the great glacier which descends into the valley near Casapangue, and which will some day be a favourite resort of those who wish to make the as yet unattempted ascent of the Tronador mountain, from whose precipices avalanches are constantly falling, with the thundering noise which has given a name to the mountain.
On reaching the foot of the glacier, from an arch in which a considerable torrent emerged, I was much surprised to find growing on the stony debris which had been brought down from above by the moving ice a whole grove of beech trees, some of them fifteen to twenty feet high, and a great quantity of Gunnera chilensis Lam, in fruit, from which I have since raised seedlings. There was no moraine on either side as far as I could see, but the dense forest came right down to the edge of the ice. Neither in the Himalaya nor in the Alps have I ever seen a glacier which from a naturalist's or Alpinist's point of view seemed so interesting as this, and so well deserving of careful examination and description.
From Casapangue to Puella on the shore of Lake Todos Santos is a beautiful ride of twelve to fifteen miles through superb forest where ​I saw humming-birds and a magnificent tree, Eucryphia cordifolia Cav., growing eighty to a hundred feet high and covered with large white flowers. This has been introduced to cultivation (by Messrs. Veitch, I think), but not long enough to show its beauty in England.
Lake Todos Santos is buried in forest as yet quite uninhabited except by Messrs. Hube and Achelis’s employees at Puella. We crossed it in another small steamer, and attempted to photograph a remarkable volcanic peak called Punta Agudo on the north shore, but the clouds which hang over it make it hard to realise the sharpness of its cone, the upper slopes of which appeared to lie at an angle of at least fifty degrees.
Landing at Petrehue on the north-west end of the lake, we passed over the southern slopes of another great volcano called the Volcan de Osorno, whose upper half was covered with snow and whose base was covered with deep beds of volcanic ashes and sand, deeply cut into ravines, which in some places were forest-clad and full of ferns, Myrtaceous shrubs and other interesting plants. Passing along the bank of the deep and rapid Petrehue river, here one hundred yards wide and quite impassable, we carnc to a great marshy flat on the shores of Lake Llanquiliue, where I had to wait a day for the arrival of the steamer which plies to the various German settlements and farms around its shores. This part of Chile has been settled a good many years and is developing rapidly. We reached Puerto Varas, on the other side of the lake, after dark, and were only just in time to catch the Pacific Company’s steamer at Puerto Montt, from whence, calling at Calbuco, Ancud in the island of Chiloe, and Corral, the port of Valdivia, I reached Concepcion and from there returned by rail to Santiago and Buenos Ayres.
Though such a reconnaissance as this gives one no right to form theories on the origin of the Chilean flora and fauna, yet I realised on my journey certain facts which I never realised by reading, and which I think may help to explain why the fauna of Chile is so poor in species, considering the immense extent and very varied climate of the country.
From a climatic point of view Chile may be divided into three regions. Of the northern part, including the provinces of Tacna, Tarapaca, Anto¬ fagasta, Atacama, and perhaps Coquimbo, I know nothing personally, but believe that for the most part they are too arid to support a rich flora or fauna, and so far as I know are characterised by a total absence of forest even on the higher slopes of the mountains. This region forms a boundary quite impassable to the tropical forms which otherwise might have been expected to extend southward, seeing that the climate even as far south as Valparaiso is mild enough to enable some tropical fruits and palms to flourish.
Though some tropical forms extend on the east side of the Andes as far south as about lat. 30° S., in the Argentine provinces of Catamarca, Rioja and Cordoba, yet they are unable to extend themselves into Chile in the way they have done in similar latitudes in North America and China, owing to the absence of shelter-giving forest along the east side of the Andes. Among birds only a few hardy tropical forms such as parrots and humming-birds exist, whilst among butterflies there is hardly one, except perhaps Terias and Callidryas, which are characteristic of a tropical ​climate. Thus the fauna, and I think also the flora, of Chile are and have for ages been completely isolated on the north and east by mountains and deserts which are as good a boundary as sea.
In the central parts of Chile, from about lat. 32° S. to lat. 38° S., we have a climate like that of southern Europe, in which a great number of species of plants, mostly peculiar to the country, and a few mammals and birds, also mostly endemic, are found; and in this region forest begins to be found—though much of it has been destroyed by man—on the lower slopes of the main range of the Andes, and up about 6,000 to 8,000 feet from somewhere between lat. 34° S. and lat. 36° S. Forest of a more scattered and bushy character is also found on the coast range and in the sheltered and moister valleys between the coast and the Andes.
From about lat, 37° S. the rainfall, produced presumably by ocean currents, rapidly increases to such a point that near Valdivia, in lat. 40° S., the whole country with the exception of a few open savannahs and swamps is covered with dense forest, mostly consisting of evergreen trees, and inhabited by a very scanty bird and animal fauna. This forest extends across the Cordillera to a point often within the Argentine boundary where the rainfall intercepted by the high Andes rapidly diminishes, and where the region of the Pampas begins.
Many of the species constituting this fauna and flora descend to lower elevations as they go southward, and in some cases reach the Straits of Magellan, where they occur at sea-level.
There are, however, few species peculiar to the region south of about lat. 40° S., and the small number of birds and insects found in Southern Patagonia and in Chile south of lat.40 0 S. are mostly near allies of those which occur in the region between lat. 36° and 40° S. which constitute the South Chilian fauna, and which are able to endure a constantly wet climate, not, however, accompanied by any great degree of cold in winter.
The high mountain region of this Southern Andes has, however, been too little explored in a zoological or botanical sense to enable us to judge of its constituents. All we can say is that there is no reason to expect many new forms.
Mr, Elwes brought home a collection of 364 Chilean plants, which were named and described by the authorities at Kew; the list is preserved in the Herbarium there. It included five new orchids, one of which was named by Mr. Rolfe, after the discoverer, Chlorœa Elwesii. This orchid, whose handsome flowers are green with blade veins, was found on the Lolco pass, 6,000 feet up, in large tufts under Araucarias; it was common at the timber line. It is nearly allied to the Patagonian orchid, C. magellanica Hook., but its flowers are rather larger.
The author contributed a full list of sixty-nine Chilean butterflies, with notes and plates, to the Transactions of the Entomological Society in 1903.