WCP2086

73 Harley Street

April 4^th / [18]67

My dear M^r. Wallace,

I have been reading over again your paper published in 1855 in the "Annals" on the "Law which has regulated the introduction of new species;"¹ passages of which I intend to quote, not in reference to your priority of publication but simply, because there are some points laid down more clearly than I can find in the work of Darwin itself, in regard to the bearing [2] of the geological & zoological evidence on geographical distribution & the origin of species.

I have been looking into Darwin’s historical sketch thinking to find some allusion to your essay at page XX ^{4th ed.} when he gets to 1855 but I can find no allusion to it.² Yet surely I remember somewhere a passage in which Darwin says ^{in print} that you had told him that in 1855 you meant by such expressions as "species being created on the type of pre-existing ones closely allied", & by & what you say of modified prototypes & by [3] the passage in which you ask "what rudimentary organs mean if each species has been created independantly[sic] " etc — that new species were created by variation & in the way of ordinary generation.

Your last letter was a great help to me for it was a relief to find that the Lombok barrier was not so complete as to be a source of difficulty.³ I have also to thank you for your papers one of which I had before in the Nat[ural]. Hist[ory]. Rev[iew]. but am very glad of a separate copy.

I am rather perplexed by Darwin [4] speculating on the possibility of New Zealand having once been united with Australia (p466 4^th ed.)[.]⁴ The puzzle is greater than I can get over even looking upon it as an oceanic island. Why should there have been no mammalia, rodents & marsupials, or only one mouse. Even if the Glacial Period was such that it was enveloped in a Greenlandic winding-sheet there would have been some antarctic animals? It cannot be modern seeing the height of those Alps. It may have been a set of separate smaller islands[,] an archipelago [5] [p.2] since united into fewer. No savages could have extirpated mammalia, besides we should have found their fossils in the same places with all those species of extinct Dinornis which have come to light. Perhaps you will say that the absence of mammalia in New Caledonia is a corresponding fact.

This reminds me of another difficulty. On the hypothesis of the coral islands being the last remnants of a submerged continent ought they not have in them a crowd of peculiar & endemic types [6] each rivalling St Helena instead of which I believe they are very poor & peculiar genera. Have they all got submerged for a short time during the ups & downs to which they have been subjected Tahiti & some others having been built up by volcanic action in the Pliocene Period. Madeira & the Canaries were islands in the Upper Miocene ocean & may therefore well have peculiar endemic types of very old date & destroyed elsewhere. I have just got in [7] Wollaston’s Coleoptera Atlantidum⁵ & shall be glad to lend it you when I have read the introduction. He goes in for Continental Extension which only costs him two catastrophies by which the union & disunion with the nearest mainland may readily be accomplished.

I wish I had more knowledge of how beetles may be introduced into islands[.] Cap^t. Toynbee⁶ has supplied splendid instances of Lepidoptera flying hundreds of miles out at sea. He has been going through his log for me. The distinctness [8] of the landshells of Porto Santo & Madeira is to my mind fatal to a Post Miocene connection between the separate islands & between them & the mainland but there is a great want of parallelism between the evidence of plants & shells seeming to indicate a marvellous difference between powers of diffusion in the case of these two classes.

Believe me | ever most truly yours | Cha[rles] Lyell [signature]

A. Wallace Esq