INFOEMATION FOE DARWIN 245 



Beview, containing an article on Ross's Voyage, written, I 

 .suspect, by Sir D. Brewster. There is the most flaming 

 flattery in it of my share in the book — especially the chapter 

 on Cattle Hunting. Pray tell my mother of this : (I suspect 

 I must be a sort of humbug after all). My Journal shall be 

 copied and sent, as soon as I can get settled : for I know you 

 want it. You may easily suppose that, surrounded with 

 plants to dry, information of every kind to secure, &c., a 

 Gn'ifjin, like myself, has his hands sufficiently full of occupa- 

 tion. I try hard to understand everything as I go on, — 

 but I am sorry to find the attempt is hopeless ! 



But people were not to be persuaded that an Indian hill 

 storm which he describes to his sister Elizabeth could be inferior 

 to an Antarctic storm. 



Though more tremendous looking from the thunder and 

 lightning, it was not so strong as many S. Polar squalls 

 I have felt. People won't believe that here, and so I say 

 nothing about it. 



A double letter to Darwin (February 20, and March 4 and 16, 

 1848) which opens with the words, ' Though our correspondence 

 has not ebbed so low for full four years, you have been so 

 constantly in my thoughts that it appears far from strange to 

 be writing to you,' and ends with ' love to the children,' is too 

 long to quote in full. It answers many questions on which 

 Darwin had asked him to obtain information ; e.g. on the habits 

 of the Cheetah and the way in which it is used in hunting and 

 its curious refusal to hunt more than one season ; on the exten- 

 sion of different species, where he finds an apparently undefined 

 rule ; the Soane, for instance, in the case of the antelopes and 

 the gaur, in providing a line of demarcation, like the Obi in 

 Siberia, which Humboldt, when Hooker visited him in 1845, 

 adduced as ' dividing two Botanical regions, and (being) one 

 of the strong arguments agg^inst the migration of plants, as 

 large rivers do not in other cases prevent what is considered 

 migration.' So of elephants, dogs, cattle, squirrels, swallows, 

 saurians ; the desiccation by destruction of forests ; local 

 geology : in short, * I am perfectly bewildered by the facts 

 hourly thrown before me, whose importance I can scarce 

 appreciate from m}^ ignorance of Indian natural history ; 



VOL. I E 



