18431882] INSULAR FLORAS 489 



stocking [by] occasional transport to be something even more Letter 371 

 than a " well-established hypothesis," but disputants seldom 

 stop to measure the strength of their antagonist's opinion. 



I shall be with you on Saturday week, I hope. I should 

 have come before, but have made so little progress that I 

 could not. I am now at St. Helena, and shall then go to, and 

 finish with, Kerguelen's land. 



After giving the distances of the Azores, etc., from America, Sir 

 Joseph continues : 



But to my mind [it] does not mend the matter for I do 

 not ask why Azores have even proportionally (to distance) 

 a smaller number of American plants, but why they have 

 none, seeing the winds and currents set that way. The 

 Bermudas are all American in flora, but from what Col. 

 Munro informs me 1 should say they have nothing but 

 common American weeds and the juniper (cedar). No 

 changed forms, yet they are as far from America as Azores 

 from Europe. I suppose they are modern and out of the pale. 



. . . There is this, to me, astounding difference between 

 certain oceanic islands which were stocked by continental 

 extension and those stocked by immigration (following in 

 both definitions your opinion), that the former [continental] 

 do contain many types of the more distant continent, the 

 latter do not any ! Take Madagascar, with its many Asiatic 

 genera unknown in Africa ; Ceylon, with many Malayan 

 types not Peninsular ; Japan, with many non-Asiatic American 

 types. Baird's fact of Greenland migration I was aware of 

 since I wrote my Arctic paper. I wish I was as satisfied 

 either of continental [extensions] or of transport means as 

 I am of my Greenland hypothesis ! 



Oh, dear me, what a comfort it is to have a belief (sneer 

 away). 



J. D. Hooker to C. Darwin. Letter 372 



Kew, Dec. 4th, 1866. 



I have just finished the New Zealand Manual^ and am 

 thinking about a discussion on the geographical distribu- 

 tion, etc., of the plants. There is scarcely a single indigenous 

 annual plant in the group. I wish that I knew more of the 



1 Ha?idbook of the New Zealand Flora. 



