mething even more than a "well-established
hypothesis," but disputants seldom stop to measure the strength of their
antagonist's opinion.

I shall be with you on Saturday week, I hope. I should have come before,
but have made so little progress that I could not. I am now at St.
Helena, and shall then go to, and finish with, Kerguelen's land.

(371/1. After giving the distances of the Azores, etc., from America,
Sir Joseph continues:--)

But to my mind [it] does not mend the matter--for I do not ask why
Azores have even proportionally (to distance) a smaller number of
American plants, but why they have none, seeing the winds and currents
set that way. The Bermudas are all American in flora, but from what
Col. Munro informs me I should say they have nothing but common American
weeds and the juniper (cedar). No changed forms, yet they are as far
from America as Azores from Europe. I suppose they are modern and out of
the pale.

...There is this, to me, astounding difference between certain oceanic
islands which were stocked by continental extension and those stocked
by immigration (following in both definitions your opinion), that
the former [continental] do contain many types of the more distant
continent, the latter do not any! Take Madagascar, with its many
Asiatic genera unknown in Africa; Ceylon, with many Malayan types not
Peninsular; Japan, with many non-Asiatic American types. Baird's fact of
Greenland migration I was aware of since I wrote my Arctic paper. I wish
I was as satisfied either of continental [extensions] or of transport
means as I am of my Greenland hypothesis!

Oh, dear me, what a comfort it is to have a belief (sneer away).

LETTER 372. J.D. HOOKER TO CHARLES DARWIN. Kew, December 4th, 1866.

I have just finished the New Zealand "Manual" (372/1. "Handbook of
the New Zealand Flora."), and am thinking about a discussion on the
geographical distribution, etc., of the plants. There is scarcely a
single indigenous annual plant in the group. I wish that I knew more of
the past condition of the islands, and whether they have been rising or
sinking. There is much that suggests the idea that the islands were
once connected during a warmer epoch, were afterwards separated and
much reduced in area to what they now are, and lastly have assumed their
present size. The remarkable general uniformity of the flora, even of
the arboreous flora, throughout so many degrees of latitude, is a very
remarkable fea