Today | News | Books | Recipes Adventure | Science Fiction | Ghost stories | Poetry | Children | History Booke told Dawson) to conceive
of the force with which arguments drawn from the absence of certain
familiar ubiquitous plants strike the botanists. I would not throw over
altogether ice-transport and water-transport, but I cannot realise
their giving rise to such anomalies, in the distribution, as Greenland
presents. So, too, I have always felt the force of your objection, that
Greenland should have been depopulated in the Glacial period, but then
reflected that vegetation now ascends I forget how high (about 1,000
feet) in Disco, in 70 deg, and that even in a Glacial ocean there may
always have been lurking-places for the few hundred plants Greenland
now possesses. Supposing Greenland were repeopled from Scandinavia over
ocean way, why should Carices be the chief things brought? Why should
there have been no Leguminosae brought, no plants but high Arctic?--why
no Caltha palustris, which gilds the marshes of Norway and paints the
housetops of Iceland? In short, to my eyes, the trans-oceanic migration
would no more make such an assemblage than special creations would
account for representative species--and no "ingenious wriggling" ever
satisfied me that it would. There, then!
I dined with Henry Christy last night, who was just returned from celt
hunting with Lartet, amongst the Basques,--they are Pyreneans. Lubbock
was there, and told me that my precious speculation was one of Von
Baer's, and that the Finns are supposed to have made the Kjokken
moddings. I read Max Muller a year ago--and quite agree, first part
is excellent; last, on origin of language, fatuous and feeble as a
scientific argument.
LETTER 358. TO J.D. HOOKER. Down, November 12th [1862].
I return by this post Dawson's lecture, which seems to me interesting,
but with nothing new. I think he must be rather conceited, with his "If
Dr. Hooker had known this and that, he would have said so and so." It
seems to me absurd in Dawson assuming that North America was under sea
during the whole Glacial period. Certainly Greenland is a most curious
and difficult problem. But as for the Leguminosae, the case, my dear
fellow, is as plain as a pike-staff, as the seeds are so very quickly
killed by the sea-water. Seriously, it would be a curious experiment to
try vitality in salt water of the plants which ought to be in Greenland.
I forget, however, that it would be impossible, I suppose, to get hardly
any except the Caltha, and if ever I stumble on that plant in seed I
will try it.
I wish to Heaven some one would examine the rocks near sea-level at the
south point of Greenland, and see if they are well scored; that would
tell something. But then subsidence might have brought down higher
rocks to present sea-level. I am much more willing to admit your
Norwego-Greenland connecting land than most other cases, from the nature
of the rocks in Spitzbergen and Bear Island. You have broached and
thrown a lot of light on a splendid problem, which some day will be
solved. It rejoices me to think that, when a boy, I was shown an erratic
boulder in Shrewsbury, and was told by a clever old gentleman that till
the world's end no one would ever guess how it came there.
It makes me laugh to think of Dr. Dawson's indignation at your sentence
about "obliquity of vision." (358/1. See Letter 144.) By Jove, he will
try and pitch into you some day. Good night for the present.
To return for a moment to the Glacial period. You might have asked
Dawson whether ibex, marmot, etc., etc., were carried from mountain to
mountain in Europe on floating ice; and whether musk ox got to England
on icebergs? Yet England has subsided, if we trust to the good evidence
of shells alone, more during Glacial period than America is known to
have done.
For Heaven's sake instil a word of caution into Tyndall's ears. I saw
an extract that valleys of Switzerland were wholly due to glaciers. He
cannot have reflected on valleys in tropical countries. The grandest
valleys I ever saw were in Tahiti. Again, if I understand, he supposes
that glaciers wear down whole mountain ranges; thus lower their height,
decrease the temperature, and decrease the glaciers themselves. Does
he suppose the whole of Scotland thus worn down? Surely he must forget
oscillation of level would be more potent one way or another during such
enormous lapses of time. It would be hard to believe any mountain range
has been so long stationary.
I suppose Lyell's book will soon be out. (358/2. "The Antiquity of Man,"
1863.) I was very glad to see in a newspaper that Murray sold 4,000.
What a sale!
I am now working on cultivated plants, and rather like my work; but I
am horribly afraid I make the rashest remarks on value of differences. I
trust to a sort of instinct, and, God knows, can seldom give any reason
for my remarks. Lord, in what a medley the origin of cultivated plants
is. I have been reading on strawberries, and I can find hardly two
botanists agree what are the wild forms; but I pick out of horticultural
books here and there queer cases of variation, inheritance, etc., etc.
What a long letter I have scribbled; but you must forgive me, for it is
a great pleasure thus talking to you.
Did you ever hear of "Condy's Ozonised Water"? I have been trying
it with, I think, extraordinary advantage--to comfort, at least. A
teaspoon, in water, three or four times a day. If you meet any poor
dyspeptic devil like me, suggest it.
LETTER 359. TO J.D. HOOKER. Down, 26th [March 1863].
I hope and think you are too severe on Lyell's early chapters. Though
so condensed, and not well arranged, they seemed to me to convey with
uncommon force the antiquity of man, and that was his object. (359/1.
"The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man": London, 1863.) It
did not occur to me, but I fear there is some truth in your criticism,
that nothing is to be trusted until he [Lyell] had observed it.
I am glad to see you stirred up about tropical plants during Glacial
period.
Remember that I have many times sworn to you that they coexisted; so,
my dear fellow, you must make them coexist. I do not think that greater
coolness in a disturbed condition of things would be required than the
zone of the Himalaya, in which you describe some tropical and temperate
forms commingling (359/2. "During this [the Glacial period], the coldest
point, the lowlands under the equator, must have been clothed with a
mingled tropical and temperate vegetation, like that described by Hooker
as growing luxuriantly at the height of from four to five thousand feet
on the lower slopes of the Himalaya, but with perhaps a still greater
preponderance of temperate forms" ("Origin of Species," Edition VI.,
page 338).); and as in the lower part of the Cameroons, and as Seemann
describes, in low mountains of Panama. It is, as you say, absurd to
suppose that such a genus as Dipterocarpus (359/3. Dipterocarpus,
a genus of the Dipterocarpaceae, a family of dicotyledonous plants
restricted to the tropics of the Old World.) could have been develope |