248 MISCELLANEA — (continued). [188 1. 



I will now jot down without any order a few miscellaneous 

 remarks. 



I think you ought to allude to Alph. De Candolle's great 

 book, for though it (like almost everything else) is washed out 

 of my mind, yet I remember most distinctly thinking it a 

 very valuable work. Anyhow, you might allude to his 

 excellent account of the history of all cultivated plants. 



How shall you manage to allude to your New Zealand and 

 Tierra del Fuego work ? if you do not allude to them you 

 will be scandalously unjust. 



The many Angiosperm plants in the Cretacean beds of the 

 United States (and as far as I can judge the age of these 

 beds has been fairly well made out) seems to me a fact of 

 very great importance, so is their relation to the existing flora 

 of the United States under an Evolutionary point of view. 

 Have not some Australian extinct forms been lately found in 

 Australia ? or have I dreamed it ? 



Again, the recent discovery of plants rather low down in 

 our Silurian beds is very important. 



Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of the Vege- 

 table Kingdom, as it seems to me, than the apparently very 

 sudden or abrupt development of the higher plants. I have 

 sometimes speculated whether there did not exist somewhere 

 during long ages an extremely isolated continent, perhaps 

 near the South Pole. 



Hence I was greatly interested by a view which Saporta 

 propounded to me, a few years ago, at great length in MS. 

 and which I fancy he has since published, as I urged him to 

 do — viz., that as soon as flower-frequenting insects were 

 developed, during the latter part of the secondary period, an 

 enormous impulse was given to the development of the higher 

 plants by cross-fertilization being thus suddenly formed. 



A few years ago I was much struck with Axel Blytt's * 

 Essay showing from observation, on the peat beds in Scandi- 



* See footnote, Vol. iii. p. 215. 



