Alfred Russel Wallace 



^ 



I wrote to Forel, who is always at work on ants, and 

 told Mm of your views about the dispersal of the blind 

 Coleoptera, and asked him to observe. 



I spoke to Hooker about your book, and feel sure that 

 he would like nothing better than to consider the distribu- 

 tion of plants in relation to your views; but he seemed to 

 doubt whether he should ever have time. 



And now I have done my jottings, and once again con- 

 gratulate you on having brought out so grand a work. I 

 have been a little disappointed at the review in Nature,^ — 

 My dear Wallace, yours sincerely, Charles Darwin. 



Rose Hilly Dorking. July 23, 1876. 



My dear Darwin, — I should have replied sooner to your 

 last kind and interesting letters, but they reached me in 

 the midst of my packing previous to removal here, and I 

 have only just now got my books and papers in a get-at- 

 able state. 



And first, many thanks for your close observation in 

 detecting the two absurd mistakes in the tabular headings. 



As to the former greater distinction of the North and 

 South American faunas, I think I am right. The Eden- 

 tata, being proved (as I hold) to have been mere temporary 

 migrants into North America in the post-Pliocene epoch, 

 form no part of its Tertiary fauna. Yet in South America 

 they were so enormously developed in the Pliocene epoch 

 that we know, if there is any such thing as Evolution, etc., 

 that strange ancestral forms must have preceded them in 

 Miocene times. 



Mastodon, on the other hand, represented by one or two 

 species only, appears to have been a late immigrant into 

 South America from the North. 



The immense development of Ungulates (in varied 



1 June 22, 1876, p. 165 ei seq. 

 294 



