phism in
our last and incorrect sense in your works; I see that it must be most
difficult to take any sort of constant limit for the amount of possible
variation. How heartily I do wish that all your works were out and
complete; so that I could quietly think over them. I fear the Pacific
Islands must be far distant in futurity. I fear, indeed, that Forbes is
going rather too quickly ahead; but we shall soon see all his grounds,
as I hear he is now correcting the press on this subject; he has plenty
of people who attack him; I see Falconer never loses a chance, and it
is wonderful how well Forbes stands it. What a very striking fact is the
botanical relation between Africa and Java; as you now state it, I
am pleased rather than disgusted, for it accords capitally with
the distribution of the mammifers (320/3. See Wallace, "Geogr.
Distribution," Volume I., page 263, on the "special Oriental or even
Malayan element" in the West African mammals and birds.): only that I
judge from your letters that the Cape differs even more markedly than I
had thought, from the rest of Africa, and much more than the mammifers
do. I am surprised to find how well mammifers and plants seem to accord
in their general distribution. With respect to my strong objection to
Aug. St. Hilaire's language on AFFAIBLISSEMENT (320/4. This refers to
his "Lecons de Botanique (Morphologie Vegetale)," 1841. Saint-Hilaire
often explains morphological differences as due to differences in
vigour. See Letter 319.), it is perhaps hardly rational, and yet he
confesses that some of the most vigorous plants in nature have some of
their organs struck with this weakness--he does not pretend, of course,
that they were ever otherwise in former generations--or that a more
vigorously growing plant produces organs less weakened, and thus fails
in producing its typical structure. In a plant in a state of nature,
does cutting off the sap tend to produce flower-buds? I know it does in
trees in orchards. Owen has been doing some grand work in the morphology
of the vertebrata: your arm and hand are parts of your head, or rather
the processes (i.e. modified ribs) of the occipital vertebra! He gave me
a grand lecture on a cod's head. By the way, would it not strike you as
monstrous, if in speaking of the minute and lessening jaws, palpi, etc.,
of an insect or crustacean, any one were to say they were produced
by the affaiblissement of the less important but larger organs of
locomot