AN AUEOBA IN INDIA 239 



account of the Aurora to Wheatstone.^ Eef erring to this the 

 following year he tells his father : 



»I thought I had said enough of the Aurora, and was only- 

 afraid of troubling you with too much unbotanical matter 

 for the Journal ; besides I did not consider that phenomenon 

 to be so very wonderful as to cause surprise — much less 

 argument. The sceptics may content themselves with 

 ' tant pis pour le fait ' ; it required no witchcraft to pro- 

 nounce upon the display which I beheld ; and, in such a 

 country, as India, where every Englishman eats a heavy 

 dinner at 8 and goes to bed at 10, it is not astonishing that 

 these spectacles have been hitherto unobserved. I suppose 

 I should be snubbed for averring that I have seen others 

 since, and in the daytime. 



Meantime he is able to assure his parents ' I am in perfect 

 health and enjoying myself exceedingly.' He spared them the 

 anxiety of knowing what he told Darwin (p. 246) that he 

 still felt the results of his rheumatic fever at Madeira nearly 

 nine years before. 



His examination of the Burdwan coal fossils threw no 

 material light on the question of their age, a question which, 

 he tells Darwin, is no less perplexing there than at home. 

 Others boldly assigned most of them to the Lower Oolitic epoch 

 of England, from the prevalence of certain species, also found 

 in Sind and Australia. In his cautious judgment the evidence 

 was insufficient ; the form of the fronds alone, especially in 

 fossil fragments, supplied frail characters for specific identifi- 

 cation ; considering that ' the botanical evidences which 

 geologists too often accept as proofs of specific identities are 

 such as no botanist would attach any importance to in the 

 investigation of existing plants.' Kecent ferns were so widely 

 distributed that inspection generally gave no clue to their 

 place of origin, and considering the wide difference in latitude 

 and longitude of Yorkshire, India, and Austraha, the natural 

 conclusion is that they could not have supported a similar 



^ Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802-75), the famous discoverer and inventor 

 in the fields of acoustics, optics, and electricity, to whom we owe the practical 

 foundations of telegraphy. 



