THE TASMANIAN ESSAY 461 



Put end of string on globe on England and other end on 

 V.D.L., and it will run through the most continuous masses 

 of land on globe ; it is the greatest stretch of all but dry land 

 that you can find, and I can connect the Botany the whole 

 way by mountains of (1) Borneo ; (2) Java and Ceylon 

 and Penins. Ind. ; (3) Khasia ; (4) Himal. ; (5) Caucasus ; 

 (6) Alps ; (7) Scandinavia. I can thus connect botanically 

 England with V.D.L. better than I could Canada with 

 Fuegia ! 



Kew : December 21, 1858. 



I am and have been working hard at my Essay and 

 make about as slow progress as you say you do. I am 

 utterly staggered by some of the facts of distribution : here 

 is wild rice and lots of other plants identical with the Indian, 

 in N.W. Australia, several hundred miles from the coast, and 

 there is a most typical American plant (not found in India) 

 from the same locality. I have now got together about 

 500 tropical Indian species in Australia, many of them very 

 peculiar, besides many generic types almost all Peninsular 

 Indian, not Malayan or Javanese types, but plants of the 

 sandstone ranges of Australia and India. Now though 

 there are several wet-country Australian types (not species) 

 in Malayan Islands and Peninsula, there are none in the 

 Indian Peninsula, nor are there any of the hundreds of 

 Australian sandstone and dry tropical types in the Indian 

 Peninsula. Now I never can believe that 500 Indian plants 

 got transported by existing causes to tropical Australia, and 

 that the said causes did not return one tropical Australian 

 Acacia, Eucalyptus, Stylidium, Proteacea, Goodenia, Casuarina, 

 or Eestiacea, &c. to the Indian Peninsula. 



Weeds, herbs, shrubs, and trees of many Indian families 

 have gone S.E. to Australia and nothing has come back. 

 N.B. Eucalypti, Casuarina, and Acacias grow magnificently 

 all over the Peninsula where planted and ripen loads of seed. 



You kindly promised me the loan of your Chapter on 

 transmigration of forms across tropics and I should be 

 glad of it. I am grievously troubled to know at what date 

 to assume this transmigration ; am I safe in assuming that 

 the Antarctic types entered Australia at same Epoch, and 

 what was general character of Australian Flora at that 



