THE TASMANIAN ESSAY 461 
Put end of string on globe on England and other end on 
V.D.L., and it will run through the most continuous masses 
of land on globe ; it is the greatest stretch of all but dry land 
that you can find, and I can connect the Botany the whole 
way by mountains of (1) Borneo ; (2) Java and Ceylon 
and Penins. Ind. ; (3) Khasia ; (4) Himal. ; (5) Caucasus ; 
(6) Alps ; (7) Scandinavia. I can thus connect botanically 
iSngland with V.D.L. better than I could Canada with 
Fuegia ! 
Kew : December 21, 1858. 
I am and have been working hard at my Essay and 
make about as slow progress as you say you do. I am 
utterly staggered by some of the facts of distribution : here 
is wild rice and lots of other plants identical with the Indian, 
in N.W. Austraha, several hundred miles from the coast, and 
there is a most typical American plant (not found in India) 
from the same locahty. I have now got together about 
500 tropical Indian species in Australia, many of them very 
peculiar, besides many generic types almost all Peninsular 
Indian, not Malayan or Javanese types, but plants of the 
sandstone ranges of Australia and India. Now though 
there are several wet-country Australian types (not species) 
in Malayan Islands and Peninsula, there are noiie in the 
Indian Peninsula, nor are there any of the hundreds of 
Austrahan sandstone and dry tropical types in the Indian 
Peninsula. Now I never can believe that 500 Indian plants 
got transported by existing causes to tropical Austraha, and 
that the said causes did not return one tropical Austrahan 
Acacia, Eucalyptus, Stylidium, Proteacea, Goodenia, Casuarina, 
or Bestiacea, &c. to the Indian Peninsula. 
Weeds, herbs, shrubs, and trees of many Indian famihes 
have gone S.E. to Austraha and nothing has come back. 
N.B. Eucalypti, Casuarina, and Acacias grow magnificently 
all over the Peninsula where planted and ripen loads of seed. 
You kindly promised me the loan of your Chapter on 
transmigration of forms across tropics and I should be 
glad of it. I am grievously troubled to know at what date 
to assume this transmigration ; am I safe in assuming that 
the Antarctic types entered Austraha at same Epoch, and 
what was general character of Australian Flora at that 
