area on land. "Through the air"
would moreover include occasional modes of transport other than simple
carriage by wind: e.g., the seeds might be carried by birds, either
attached to the feathers or to the mud on their feet, or in their crops
or intestines.)

I suppose it would be travelling too far (though for the geographical
section the discussion ought to be far-reaching), but I should like
to see the European or northern element in the Cape of Good Hope
flora discussed. I cannot swallow Wallace's view that European plants
travelled down the Andes, tenanted the hypothetical Antarctic continent
(in which I quite believe), and thence spread to South Australia and the
Cape of Good Hope.

Moseley told me not long ago that he proposed to search at Kerguelen
Land the coal beds most carefully, and was absolutely forbidden to do
so by Sir W. Thomson, who said that he would undertake the work, and he
never once visited them. This puts me in a passion. I hope that you will
keep to your intention and make an address on distribution. Though I
differ so much from Wallace, his "Island Life" seems to me a wonderful
book.

Farewell. I do hope that you may have a most prosperous journey. Give my
kindest remembrances to Asa Gray.

LETTER 398. TO J.D. HOOKER. Down, August 12th, 1881.

...I think that I must have expressed myself badly about Humboldt.
I should have said that he was more remarkable for his astounding
knowledge than for originality. I have always looked at him as, in fact,
the founder of the geographical distribution of organisms. I thought
that I had read that extinct fossil plants belonging to Australian forms
had lately been found in Australia, and all such cases seem to me very
interesting, as bearing on development.

I have been so astonished at the apparently sudden coming in of the
higher phanerogams, that I have sometimes fancied that development might
have slowly gone on for an immense period in some isolated continent or
large island, perhaps near the South Pole. I poured out my idle thoughts
in writing, as if I had been talking with you.

No fact has so interested me for a heap of years as your case of the
plants on the equatorial mountains of Africa; and Wallace tells me that
some one (Baker?) has described analogous cases on the mountains of
Madagascar (398/1. See Letter 397, note.)...I think that you ought to
allude to these cases.

I most fully agree that no problem is more interesting than