468 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION [CHAP. VI 



Letter 356 Dawson has published criticisms I should like to see them. 

 I have heard he is rabid against me, and no doubt partly in 

 consequence, against anything you write in my favour (and 

 never was anything published more favourable than the 

 Arctic paper). Lyell had difficulty in preventing Dawson 

 reviewing the Origin l on hearsay, without having looked 

 at it. No spirit of fairness can be expected from so biassed a 

 judge. 



All I can say is that your few first pages have im- 

 pressed me far more this reading than the first time. Can 

 the Scandinavian portion of the flora be so potent 2 from having 

 been preserved in that corner, warmed by the Gulf Stream, and 

 from now alone representing the entire circumpolar flora, during 

 the warmer pre-Glacial period ? From the first I have not 

 been able to resist the impression (shared by Asa Gray, whose 

 Review 3 on you pleased me much) that during the Glacial 

 period there must have been almost entire extinction in 

 Greenland ; for depth of sea does not favour former southerly 

 extension of land there. 4 I must suspect that plants have been 

 largely introduced by sea currents, which bring so much 

 wood from N. Europe. But here we shall split as wide as the 

 poles asunder. All the world could not persuade me, if it 

 tried, that yours is not a grand essay. I do not quite under- 

 stand whether it is this essay that Dawson has been " down 

 on." What a curious notion about Glacial climate, and 

 Basques and Finns! Are the Basques mountaineers--! hope 

 so. I am sorry I have not seen the Athenceum, but I now 

 take in the Parthenon. By the way, I have just read with 

 much interest Max Miiller ; 5 the last part, about first origin 

 of language, seems the least satisfactory part. 



1 Dawson reviewed the Origin in the Canadian Naturalist, 1860. 



2 Dr. Hooker wrote : " Regarded as a whole the Arctic flora is 

 decidedly Scandinavian ; for Arctic Scandinavia, or Lapland, though 

 a very small tract of land, contains by far the richest Arctic flora, 

 amounting to three-fourths of the whole " ; he pointed out " that the 

 Scandinavian flora is present in every latitude of the globe, and is the 

 only one that is so " (quoted by Gray, loc. cit. infra}. 



3 Asa Gray's Scientific Papers, Vol. I., p. 122. 



4 In the driving southward of the vegetation by the Glacial epoch the 

 Greenland flora would be "driven into the sea, that is, exterminated.'' 

 (Hooker quoted by Gray, loc. cit., p. 124.) 



5 Probably his Lectures on the Science of Language, 1861-64. 



