make much difference in the flora
whether they have sunk or risen a few thousand feet of late ages.

I wish you could work in your notion of certain parts of the Tropics
having kept hot, whilst other parts were cooled; I tried this scheme in
my mind, and it seemed to fail. On the whole, I like very much all that
I have read of your Introduction, and I cannot doubt that it will
have great weight in converting other botanists from the doctrine of
immutable creation. What a lot of matter there is in one of your pages!

There are many points I wish much to discuss with you.

How I wish you could work out the Pacific floras: I remember ages
ago reading some of your MS. In Paris there must be, I should think,
materials from French voyages. But of all places in the world I
should like to see a good flora of the Sandwich Islands. (348/4. See
Hillebrand, "Flora of the Hawaiian Islands," 1888.) I would subscribe
50 pounds to any collector to go there and work at the islands. Would
it not pay for a collector to go there, especially if aided by any
subscription? It would be a fair occasion to ask for aid from the
Government grant of the Royal Society. I think it is the most isolated
group in the world, and the islands themselves well isolated from each
other.

LETTER 349. TO ASA GRAY. Down, January 7th [1860].

I have just finished your Japan memoir (349/1. "Diagnostic Characters of
New Species of Phaenogamous Plants collected in Japan by Charles Wright.
With observations upon the Relations of the Japanese Flora to that of
North America, etc.: 1857-59."--"Memoirs of Amer. Acad." VI.), and I
must thank you for the extreme interest with which I have read it. It
seems to me a most curious case of distribution; and how very well you
argue, and put the case from analogy on the high probability of single
centres of creation. That great man Agassiz, when he comes to reason,
seems to me as great in taking a wrong view as he is great in observing
and classifying. One of the points which has struck me as most
remarkable and inexplicable in your memoir is the number of monotypic
(or nearly so) genera amongst the representative forms of Japan and
N. America. And how very singular the preponderance of identical and
representative species in Eastern, compared with Western, America. I
have no good map showing how wide the moderately low country is on the
west side of the Rocky Mountains; nor, of course, do I know whether
the whole of the