Ɛpsilon

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.

1
Wallace 1880a.
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).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-12752,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-12752