HUMBOLDT'S WOEK 225 



give a Garden Party on Saturday it will be a dreadful 

 ordeal I fear (except it rains !). 



Kew : August 11, 1881. 



MY DEAR DARWIN, Your letter and memos have been 

 unspeakable comforts for I was beginning to despair of 

 making my Address anything but a budget of snippets of facts 

 and ideas, and you have both helped and encouraged me to 

 give one part of it at any rate a consecutive and scientific 

 character. 



Then too the revival of our scientific correspondence and 

 interchange of ideas is extraordinarily pleasing to me, who 

 regard myself as your pupil. 



I am indeed glad that your old appreciation of Humboldt 

 is no more dimmed than is mine. I have been re-reading all 

 his Geog. Bot. Essays, and it is impossible to deny their 

 supreme ability and approach to originality. I wish I had 

 time to write, and space to give to all I think of them his 

 ' Distributio Arithmetices ' of the great groups, expressed in 

 definite proportions, is a stroke of originality, if not of genius, 

 and I have called it a sort of parallel (?) (I can't find a good 

 word !) to his Isothermal lines. 



I cannot find a reference to the permanence of continents 

 in your * Coral Keefs ' a book by the way that shook my 

 confidence in that theory more than all others put together, 

 and the effect of which it has required years of thought to 

 eliminate or rather to overlay. I thought the idea was first 

 published in your * Geological Observations,' of which I can- 

 not find my copy (but shall). Any of Dana's works must 

 have been long after both. Where does he ' reclaim,' and 

 where does J. Mellard Eeade publish his views ? 1 



I may have to allude to this subject from the Chair at 

 York in view of the papers to be read on the progress of 

 Geog. discovery in the great Continents. In respect of 

 them I have long cogitated over the fact that the main 

 water parting of Asia is not coincident with the greater 



1 Under date of August 20 he writes : ' I find that Dana was the first (of all 

 I have yet found) who broached the doctrine of permanence of position of 

 existing continents. You somewhere do the same for existing oceans, and I 

 read it lately but for the life of me cannot turn the passage up. Also in the 

 Origin you imply this. But I do not know of any one except Wallace who 

 has summed up all the arguments for it, and marshalled them with convincing 

 force.' 



