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From A. R. Wallace   11 October 1880

Pen-y-bryn, St. Peter’s Road, | Croydon.

Octr 11th. 1880

My dear Darwin

I hope you will have received a copy of my last book “Island Life”1 as I shall be very glad of your opinion on certain points in it. The first five chapters you need not read as they contain nothing fresh to you, but are necessary to make the work complete in itself. The next five chapters however (VI to X) I think will interest you, as I think, in Chapters VIII. and IX., I have found the true explanation of Geological Climates,—and on this I shall be very glad of your candid opinion as it is the very foundation stone of the book.

The rest will not contain much that is fresh to you except the three chapters on New Zealand. Sir Joseph Hooker thinks my theory of the Australian & N. Zealand floras a decided advance on any thing that has been done before.2 In connection with this the chapter on the Azores should be read.3

Chap. XVI. on the British Fauna may also interest you.

I mention these points merely that you may not trouble yourself to read the whole book unless you like.

Hoping that you are well | Believe me | Yours very faithfully | Alfred R. Wallace

C. Darwin Esq.

Footnotes

2
Wallace posited that the difference between the flora of south-western Australia and the rest of Australia could be explained geologically; during the formation of the south-western flora, the eastern parts of the continent were either widely separated from the western part or not yet risen from the ocean. The form of the sea bottom provided evidence that before the joining of eastern and western Australia, New Zealand had been in close connection with eastern Australia. Wallace thus explained the presence of tropical Australian plants in the New Zealand flora. Temperate Australian species from the western regions that were present in the New Zealand flora, he argued, would have been transmitted by sea after eastern and western Australia had formed one continent. See Wallace 1880a, pp. 464–76. This hypothesis, he claimed, fulfilled Joseph Dalton Hooker’s prediction that the anomalous floras of Australia and New Zealand would ‘present the least difficulties to whatever theory may explain the whole case’ (ibid., p. 475). Hooker was an expert on the New Zealand flora (see J. D. Hooker 1853 and J. D. Hooker 1864–7).
3
Wallace pointed out that because the Azores had never been connected to a continent, their flora and fauna contained only species that had been able to reach the islands across many hundreds of miles of ocean (Wallace 1880a, pp. 248–53).

Bibliography

Hooker, Joseph Dalton. 1853. Introductory essay to the flora of New Zealand. London: Lovell Reeve.

Hooker, Joseph Dalton. 1864–7. Handbook of the New Zealand flora: a systematic description of the native plants of New Zealand and the Chatham, Kermadec’s, Lord Auckland’s, Campbell’s, and MacQuarrie’s Islands. 2 vols. London: Lovell Reeve & Co.

Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1880a. Island life: or, the phenomena and causes of insular faunas and floras, including a revision and attempted solution of the problem of geological climates. London: Macmillan.

Summary

Indicates portions of Island life that will interest CD. Explanation of the geological climate is the foundation stone of the book.

Hooker’s approval of the theory of Australian and New Zealand floras.

Letter details

Letter no.
DCP-LETT-12752
From
Alfred Russel Wallace
To
Charles Robert Darwin
Sent from
Croydon
Source of text
DAR 106: B144
Physical description
ALS 2pp

Please cite as

Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 12752,” accessed on 16 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-12752.xml

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