4/2 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION [Chai\ VI 



Letter 358 glad to see in a newspaper that Murray sold 4,000. What 

 a sale ! 



I am now working on cultivated plants, and rather like 

 my work ; but I am horribly afraid I make the rashest 

 remarks on value of differences. I trust to a sort of instinct, 

 and, God knows, can seldom give any reason for my remarks. 

 Lord, in what a medley the origin of cultivated plants is. 

 I have been reading on strawberries, and I can find hardly 

 two botanists agree what are the wild forms ; but I pick out 

 of horticultural books here and there queer cases of variation, 

 inheritance, etc., etc. 



What a long letter I have scribbled ; but you must 

 forgive me, for it is a great pleasure thus talking to you. 



Did you ever hear of "Condy's Ozonised Water"? I 

 have been trying it with, 1 think, extraordinary advantage — 

 to comfort, at least. A teaspoon, in water, three or four 

 times a day. If you meet any poor dyspeptic devil like me, 

 suggest it. 



Letter 359 To J. D. Hooker. 



Down, 26th [March 1863]. 



I hope and think you are too severe on Lyell's early 

 chapters. Though so condensed, and not well arranged, they 

 seemed to me to convey with uncommon force the antiquity 

 of man, 1 and that was his object. It did not occur to me, 

 but I fear there is some truth in your criticism, that nothing 

 is to be trusted until he [Lyell] had observed it. 



I am glad to see you stirred up about tropical plants 

 during Glacial period. 



Remember that I have many times sworn to you that 

 they coexisted ; so, my dear fellow, you must make them 

 coexist. I do not think that greater coolness in a disturbed 

 condition of things would be required than the zone of the 

 Himalaya, in which you describe some tropical and tem- 

 perate forms commingling; 2 and as in the lower part of 



1 The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man: London, 1863. 



2 " During this [the Glacial period], the coldest point, the lowlands 

 under the equator, must have been clothed with a mingled tropical 

 and temperate vegetation, like that described by Hooker as growing 

 luxuriantly at the height of from four to five thousand feet on the lower 

 slopes of the Himalaya, but with perhaps a still greater preponderance 

 of temperate forms" {Origi?i of Species, Ed. VI., p. 338). 



