ead it on its first
appearance I did not pay special attention to this point except to note
that your views agreed more closely with those I had advanced, derived
from the distribution of animals, than those of any previous writer on
botanical distribution. When, at a much later period, on coming to the
end of my work, I determined to give a chapter to the New Zealand flora
in order to see how far the geological and physical relations between
New Zealand and Australia would throw light on its origin, I went for my
facts to the works of Sir Joseph Hooker and Mr. Bentham, and also to
your article in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," and worked out my
conclusions solely from these, and from the few facts referring to the
migration of plants which I had collected. Had I referred again to your
lecture I should certainly have quoted the cases you give (in a note, p.
431) of plants extending along the Andes from California to Peru and
Chile, and vice versa. Whatever identity there is in our views was
therefore arrived at independently, and it was an oversight on my part
not referring to your views, partly due to your not having made them a
more prominent feature of your very interesting and instructive lecture.
Working as I do at home, I am obliged to get my facts from the few books
I can get together; and I only attempted to deal with these great
botanical questions because the facts seemed sufficiently broad and
definite not to be much affected by errors of detail or recent additions
to our knowledge, and because the view which I took of the past changes
in Australia and New Zealand seemed calculated to throw so much light
upon them. Without such splendid summaries of the relations of the
Southern floras as are given in Sir J. Hooker's Introductions, I should
not have touched the subject at all; and I venture to hope that you or
some of your colleagues will give us other such summaries, brought down
to the present date, of other important floras--as, for example, those
of South Africa and South Temperate America.

Many thanks for additional peculiar British plants. When I hear what Mr.
Mitten has to say about the mosses, etc., I should like to send a
corrected list to _Nature_, which I shall ask you to be so good as to
give a final look over.--Believe me yours very faithfully,

ALFRED R. WALLACE.

P.S.--Mr. Darwin strongly objects to my view of the migration of plants
along mountain-ranges, rather than along lowlands during