490 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION [CHAP. VI 



Letter 372 past condition of the islands, and whether they have been 

 rising or sinking. There is much that suggests the idea that 

 the islands were once connected during a warmer epoch, 

 were afterwards separated and much reduced in area to 

 what they now are, and lastly have assumed their present 

 size. The remarkable genera luniformity of the flora, even of 

 the arboreous flora, throughout so many degrees of latitude, is 

 a very remarkable feature, as is the representation of a good 

 many of the southern half of certain species of the north, by 

 very closely allied varieties or species ; and, lastly, there is 

 the immense preponderance of certain genera whose species 

 all run into one another and vary horribly, and which suggest 

 a rising area. I hear that a whale has been found some miles 

 inland. 



Letter 373 J. D. Hooker to C. Darwin. 



Kew, Dec. I4th, 1866. 



I do not see how the mountains of New Zealand, 

 S. Australia, and Tasmania could have been peopled, and 

 [with] so large an extent of antarctic 1 forms common to 

 Fuegia, without some intercommunication. And I have 

 always supposed this was before the immigration of Asiatic 

 plants into Australia, and of which plants the temperate and 

 tropical plants of that country may be considered as altered 

 forms. The presence of so many of these temperate and cold 

 Australian and New Zealand genera on the top of Kini Balu 

 in Borneo (under the equator) is an awful staggerer, and 

 demands a very extended northern distribution of Australian 

 temperate forms. It is a frightful assumption that the plains 

 of Borneo were covered with a temperate cold vegetation that 

 was driven up Kini Balu by the returning cold. Then there 

 is the very distant distribution of a few Australian types 

 northward to the Philippines, China, and Japan : that is a 

 fearful and wonderful fact, though, as these plants are New 

 Zealand too for the most part, the migration northward may 

 have been east of Australia. 



1 Ijitroductory Essay to Flora of Neiv Zealand, p. xx. "The plants 

 of the Antarctic islands, which are equally natives of New Zealand, 

 Tasmania, and Australia, are almost invariably found only on the lofty 

 mountains of these countries." 



