t confess (I hardly know why) I have got
rather to mistrust poor dear Forbes.

There is wonderful ill logic in his famous and admirable memoir on
distribution, as it appears to me, now that I have got it up so as to
give the heads in a page. Depend on it, my saying is a true one--viz.
that a compiler is a great man, and an original man a commonplace man.
Any fool can generalise and speculate; but oh, my heavens, to get up at
second hand a New Zealand Flora, that is work...

And now I am going to beg almost as great a favour as a man can beg of
another: and I ask some five or six weeks before I want the favour done,
that it may appear less horrid. It is to read, but well copied out, my
pages (about forty!!) on Alpine floras and faunas, Arctic and Antarctic
floras and faunas, and the supposed cold mundane period. It would be
really an enormous advantage to me, as I am sure otherwise to make
botanical blunders. I would specify the few points on which I most want
your advice. But it is quite likely that you may object on the ground
that you might be publishing before me (I hope to publish in a year at
furthest), so that it would hamper and bother you; and secondly you may
object to the loss of time, for I daresay it would take an hour and a
half to read. It certainly would be of immense advantage to me; but of
course you must not think of doing it if it would interfere with your
own work.

I do not consider this request in futuro as breaking my promise to give
no more trouble for some time.

From Lyell's letters, he is coming round at a railway pace on the
mutability of species, and authorises me to put some sentences on this
head in my preface.

I shall meet Lyell on Wednesday at Lord Stanhope's, and will ask him to
forward my letter to you; though, as my arguments have not struck him,
they cannot have force, and my head must be crotchety on the subject;
but the crotchets keep firmly there. I have given your opinion on
continuous land, I see, too strongly.

LETTER 50. TO S.P. WOODWARD. Down, July 18th [1856].

Very many thanks for your kindness in writing to me at such length, and
I am glad to say for your sake that I do not see that I shall have to
beg any further favours. What a range and what a variability in the
Cyrena! (50/1. A genus of Lamellibranchs ranging from the Lias to the
present day.) Your list of the ranges of the land and fresh-water shells
certainly is most striking and curious, and especially as