258 TO DAEJILING : FIRST HIMALAYAN JOURNEY 
a pile six feet high in the drying papers. ' If I can only suc- 
ceed,' he cries, ' in getting these glorious things to Kew, how 
happy I shall be.' 
As to the distribution of plants, these Himalayan valleys 
presented a striking parallel to the Antarctic. In the humid 
and equable chmate of the latter, botanical orders which onty 
reached lat. 30° or 40° in the northern hemisphere, reached 
Tasmania and New Zealand and even Cape Horn in 55° S. 
So in Sikkim, where it was not dry enough for the Skimmia 
in its native home to ripen the scarlet berries which light up our 
English gardens, some tropical genera pushed abundantly into 
the temperate zone, fostered by the damp and equable climate. 
The general features of Himalayan botany he sums up 
as follows (May 18, 1848) : 
In travelling N. you come upon genus replacing genus, 
Natm'al Order replacing Natm'al Order. In travelling E. 
or W. (i.e. N.W. or S.E. along the ridges) you find species 
replacing species, and this whether of animals or plants. 
Don't forget to send this to Darwin. 
On July 24 (the extracts being given in brackets) and 
August 9 he writes : 
The rapidity with which the flowering season is advancing 
is quite wonderful, and I have accordingly doubled my estab- 
lishment of collectors. I pay very liberally, often for trash, 
and they all hke to bring me things. They are capricious and 
apt to run away if offended, but mine hke me and I them, 
and such fellows will do anything for a master. I have 
always a horde of them in pay, at 8s. to I65. a month. I 
have 18 at this present moment, for the plants are llowering 
and dying so rapidly that it takes all my energy to keep a good 
collection up. The papers too have all to be changed daily 
and dried individual^ over the fire — the rooms are so damp 
that hanging up to dry is no use. Everything moulds which 
is not kept at the fire. All my plants are on a circle of chairs 
immediately round the fender, inside which two Lepchas 
squat and dry papers all day long, in two rooms. [I am 
dreadfully badly off for paper, having used all that Falconer 
sent me up and all the newspapers (do you remember the 
