vn] A PRIMITIVE FLORA 



it grows has remained geologically at rest. I therefore believe that 

 when a flora is rich, it must be on land which has long remained 

 emerged and unchanged, at least from the middle of the Tertiary 

 period, which means from a time in which the formation of new 

 specific forms had not yet ceased. If it be possible to imagine a 

 spot where the forest has remained untouched and unchanged since 

 remote geological epochs, and where the vegetation has continued 

 to flourish uninterruptedly for hundreds of centuries since the 

 period when that land first emerged from the ocean, and if any 

 such localities exist on the surface of the earth, the forest of 

 Mattang and that in the vicinity of Kuching ought to be among 

 their number. 



It remains to be seen whether all the forms belonging to the 

 above-mentioned genera of Dipterocarpeae, found in so restricted 

 an area, are in reality forms due to the gradual evolution of a few 

 archetypes, or if they be not rather the result of hybridism 

 amongst the latter. I have not a blind faith in the slow and gradual 

 progressive evolution of organisms, and in the formation of species 

 as a result of continuous but insensible variation from pre-existing 

 forms. I am more inclined to admit the sudden appearing of some 

 principal adaptation forms, and I believe that originally hybrids 

 between such prototypes have been the reason of the concatenation 

 of all organisms and of the apparent descent of one from the other. 

 I hold that hybridism has had a large share in the formation of 

 existing species ; and it seems to me possible that, in the creative 

 or plasmative period, even widely differing types could cross and 

 produce offspring, owing, as I have previously said, to the very 

 imperfect influence of the force of heredity at the period when the 

 world was voune:. 



93 



