which I am familiar from your papers, will be new to
most of your readers. I think I enjoyed most the Timor case, as it is
best demonstrated; but perhaps Celebes is really the most valuable. I
should prefer looking at the whole Asiatic continent as having formerly
been more African in its fauna, than admitting the former existence of a
continent across the Indian Ocean. Decaisne's paper on the flora of
Timor, in which he points out its close relation to that of the
Mascarene Islands, supports your view. On the other hand, I might
advance the giraffes, etc., in the Sewalik deposits. How I wish someone
would collect the plants of Banca! The puzzle of Java, Sumatra and
Borneo is like the three geese and foxes: I have a wish to extend
Malacca through Banca to part of Java and thus make three parallel
peninsulas, but I cannot get the geese and foxes across the river.

Many parts of your book have interested me much: I always wished to
hear an independent judgment about the Rajah Brooke, and now I have been
delighted with your splendid eulogium on him.

With respect to the fewness and inconspicuousness of the flowers in the
tropics, may it not be accounted for by the hosts of insects, so that
there is no need for the flowers to be conspicuous? As, according to
Humboldt, fewer plants are social in the tropical than in the temperate
regions, the flowers in the former would not make so great a show.

In your note you speak of observing some inelegancies of style. I notice
none. All is as clear as daylight. I have detected two or three errata.

In Vol. I. you write lond_i_acus: is this not an error?

Vol. II., p. 236: for _western_ side of Aru read _eastern_.

Page 315: Do you not mean the horns of the moose? For the elk has not
palmated horns.

I have only one criticism of a general nature, and I am not sure that
other geologists would agree with me: you repeatedly speak as if the
pouring out of lava, etc., from volcanoes actually caused the subsidence
of an adjoining area. I quite agree that areas undergoing opposite
movements are somehow connected; but volcanic outbursts must, I think,
be looked at as mere accidents in the swelling tip of a great dome or
surface of _plutonic_ rocks; and there seems no more reason to conclude
that such swelling or elevation in mass is the cause of the subsidence
than that the subsidence is the cause of the elevation; which latter
view is indeed held by some geologists, I have regretted to