My dear Redfield,—I was interested in your Corema Con.
I have a remark to make on the last sentence of it; I would ask, How could the plant have an introduction following the glacial period? And where could it have come from?
Of course my idea is that it existed at the higher north before the glacial period—that is my fad.
But one sees that this is one of a few plants that may be appealed to in behalf of an Atlantis theory,—as coming across the Atlantic, making this Corema a derivation from C. alba, of Portugal, or of its ancestor. But the Atlantic is thought to be too deep for an Atlantis; and we do not need it much.
What induces me to refer to your paragraph is to ask whether your “following the glacial period,” that is, recent introduction, means in your thought that our species is a direct descendant of Corema alba, which by some chance got wafted across the Atlantic.
That is the most probable notion, next to my theory.
For consider, we know the genus only on these two opposite shores.
Perhaps—so far as I know, there is no more C. alba in the Old World than C. Conradii in the New. And if it were in New England that the former occurs, we could say that the Old World received the genus from the New—via the Gulf Stream.
November 6.
... I start farther back than the retreat of the glaciers. I suppose that the common ancestor of both Coremas was in the high north before the glacial period, and that the two, in their limited but dissociated habitats, are what is left after such vicissitudes!