Alfred Russel Wallace 



that I place my judgment on this subject on a level with 

 yours. A wonderfully good paper was published about a 

 year ago on India in the Geological Journal — I think by 

 Blandford.^ Kamsay agreed with me that it was one of 

 the best published for a long time. The author shows that 

 India has been a continent with enormous fresh-water lakes 

 from the Permian period to the present day. If I remember 

 right he believes in a former connection with South Africa. 



I am sure that I read, some 20 to 30 years ago, in 

 a French journal, an account of teeth of mastodon found 

 in Timor ; but the statement may have been an error. 



With respect to what you say about the colonising of 

 New Zealand, I somewhere have an account of a frog 

 frozen in the ice of a Swiss glacier, and which revived 

 when thawed. I may add that there is an Indian toad 

 which can resist salt water and haunts the seaside. 

 Nothing ever astonished me more than the case of the 

 Galaxias; but it does not seem known whether it may not 

 be a migratory fish like the salmon. It seems to me that 

 you complicate rather too much the successive colonisa- 

 tions with New Zealand. I should prefer believing that 

 the Galaxias w^as a species, like the Emys of the Sewalik 

 Hills, which has long retained the same form. Your re- 

 marks on the insects and flowers of New Zealand have 

 greatly interested me; but aromatic leaves I have always 

 looked at as a protection against their being eaten by 

 insects or other animals; and as insects are there rare, 

 such protection would not be much needed. I have writ- 

 ten more than I intended, and I must again say how pro- 

 foundly your book has interested me. 



Now let me turn to a very different subject. I have 



1 H. F. Blandford, " On the Age and Correlations of the Plant-bearing 

 Series of India and the Former Existence of an Indo-Oceanic Continent " 

 {Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, 1875, xxxi. 519). 



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