Dear Darwin

Thanks for your letter & its enclosure from A. Gray¹ which contains nil Botanices & is a reminder that I owe a collector of his for plants purchased by Thomson at Calcutta—² I do expect a Botanical letter ere long & will send it you if it contains any interest.

Your arguments have certainly some force, but the interferences of space, time & temperature are becoming so complicated, that really it makes me almost giddy. There is one point that appears to me a fundamental one, which is, that in transporting the Sub Arctic sp. across the tropics you expose them to more extreme conditions than any other plants can ever be subjected to— they suffer more change of climate, & of association than any others, & they ought to be proportionally the most altered; I must confess that however much you may modify the effects of such operations, I do not see how you can subvert the first obvious deduction from such facts. I would almost rather allow them an expansive power, a sort of absolute amount of specific character that however much masked & so to speak latent in the tropical part of their course, becomes apparent again in them as they reach subantarctic regions— this is horrible I know to you. Much depends however upon preliminary points not yet settled— What are your causes alone efficient?—

You cannot but allow of Time + altered conditions + altered associations—& that all these are more or less convertible terms.— You know that I think there are species now existing in all regions from subarctic to subantarctic, but where Trop. specimens are not recognized as identical specifically with the subarctic & subantarctic—which latter are recognized as identical.

Do send your notice (if only 2 lines) of owl seed germinating to Linnæan— the L. Journal should be the deposit for all such isolated facts.³

Thanks for A Gray’s letter. I do rub my hands & chuckle (like Lyell) at the happy idea of my being caught in a Paradox— ⁴ I know the human soul loves paradox, even to miracle, & that this love of it is one of the curses of science, but Lord bless you my dear Darwin it is the greatest paradox in the world to think of Conifers as any thing but very high in the Vegetable Kingdom.— Like⁵

The Seeds you sent were Raspberry.— ⁶