AN AUK OR A IN INDIA 239 
account of the Aurora to Wheatstone.^ Referring 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, supphed 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.' Recent 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 
1 Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802-75), the famous discoverer and inventor 
in the fields of acoustics, optics, and electricity, to whom we owe the practical 
foimdations of telegraphy. 
