18431882] TASMANIAN FLORA 459 



in converting other botanists from the doctrine of immutable etter 348 

 creation. What a lot of matter there is in one of your 

 pages ! 



There are many points I wish much to discuss with you. 



How I wish you could work out the Pacific floras : I 

 remember ages ago reading some of your MS. In Paris 

 there must be, I should think, materials from French voyages. 

 But of all places in the world I should like to see a good 

 flora of the Sandwich Islands. 1 I would subscribe 50 to any 

 collector to go there and work at the islands. Would it not 

 pay for a collector to go there, especially if aided by any 

 subscription ? It would be a fair occasion to ask for aid 

 from the Government grant of the Royal Society. I think 

 it is the most isolated group in the world, and the islands 

 themselves well isolated from each other. 



To Asa Gray. Letter 349 



Down, Jan. 7th [1860]. 



I have just finished your Japan memoir, 2 and I must 

 thank you for the extreme interest with which I have read 

 it. It seems to me a most curious case of distribution ; 

 and how very well you argue, and put the case from analogy 

 on the high probability of single centres of creation. That 

 great man Agassiz, when he comes to reason, seems to me 

 as great in taking a wrong view as he is great in observing 

 and classifying. One of the points which has struck me 

 as most remarkable and inexplicable in your memoir is 

 the number of monotypic (or nearly so) genera amongst 

 the representative forms of Japan and N. America. And 

 how very singular the preponderance of identical and repre- 

 sentative species in Eastern, compared with Western, 

 America. I have no good map showing how wide the 

 moderately low country is on the west side of the Rocky 

 Mountains ; nor, of course, do I know whether the whole 

 of the low western territory has been botanised ; but it has 

 occurred to me, looking at such maps as I have, that the 



1 See Hillebrand, Flora of the Hawaiian Isla7tds, 1888. 



2 " Diagnostic Characters of New Species of Phaenogamous Plants 

 collected in Japan by Charles Wright. With Observations upon the 

 Relations of the Japanese Flora to that of North America, etc. : 

 1857-59." Memoirs of Amer. Acad., VI. 



