Royal Gardens, Kew. November 10, 1880.
Dear Mr. Wallace,—I have been waiting to thank you for "Island Life" till I should have read it through as carefully as I am digesting the chapters I have finished; but I can delay no longer, if only to say that I heartily enjoy it, and believe that you have brushed away more cobwebs that have obscured the subject than any other, besides giving a vast deal that is new, and admirably setting forth what is old, so as to throw new light on the whole subject. It is, in short, a first-rate book. I am making notes for you, but hitherto have seen no defect of importance except in the matter of the Bahamas, whose flora is Floridan, not Cuban, in so far as we know it....—Very truly yours,
JOS. D. HOOKER.
TO SIR W. THISELTON-DYER
Pen-y-bryn, St. Peter's Road, Croydon. January 7, 1881.
Dear Mr. Thiselton-Dyer,—If I had had your lecture before me when writing the last chapters of my book I should certainly have quoted you in support of the view of the northern origin of the Southern flora by migration along existing continents. On reading it again I am surprised to find how often you refer to this; but when I read 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 "Encyclopædia 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 [pg 035] 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 cold periods. This latter view seems to me as difficult and inadequate as mine does to him.—A.R.W.