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Updated: May 7, 2025
These geographical speculations were indulged in ten years after Edward Forbes had published his bold generalisations on the geological changes which accompanied the successive establishment of the Scandinavian, Germanic, and other living floras and faunas in the British Islands, and, like the theories of his predecessor, were the results of much reflection on a vast body of geological facts.
The resemblance of the flora of Aix-la-Chapelle to the tertiary and living floras in the proportional number of dicotyledonous angiosperms as compared to the gymnogens, is a subject of no small theoretical interest, because we can now affirm that these Aix plants flourished before the rich reptilian fauna of the secondary rocks had ceased to exist.
On the ground below the two Floras are two of the most delightful pieces of all the Exposition sculpture. One is a little Pan, pipes in hand, sitting on a skin spread over an Ionic capital. This is a real boy, crouching to watch the lizard that has crawled out from beneath the stone. The other is a young girl dreaming the dreams of childhood. There is something essentially girlish about this.
In the southern hemisphere, if we compare large tracts of land in Australia, South Africa, and western South America, between latitudes 25° and 35°, we shall find parts extremely similar in all their conditions, yet it would not be possible to point out three faunas and floras more utterly dissimilar.
Sir Joseph Hooker thinks my theory of the Australian and New Zealand floras a decided advance on anything that has been done before. In connection with this, the chapter on the Azores should be read. 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.
The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for mere convenience sake. Guided by theoretical considerations, I thought that some interesting results might be obtained in regard to the nature and relations of the species which vary most, by tabulating all the varieties in several well-worked floras.
If you ask the English for their distinguishing name, you will be told "Wellingtonias," if you ask the Americans they will reply "Washingtonias." But whether they recall the memory of the phlegmatic victor of Waterloo, or of the illustrious founder of the American Republic, they are the hugest products known of the Californian and Nevadan floras.
Of course these plants introduced by man, if they are cut out, must be cut out of only one of the floras, namely, the European; for they, probably, came from the south-east, by whatever means they came.
The evolutionary hypothesis here advocated also serves to explain all those remarkable facts which were stated in the first chapter to be explicable by the theory of Natural Selection, namely, the relation of existing to recent faunas and floras; the phenomena of homology and of rudimentary structures; also the processes gone through in development; and lastly, the wonderful facts of mimicry.
In looking at such an instance of intellectual pleasure and acumen, as connected in no small degree with the study of foreign languages, one cannot avoid associating together the unsolved mystery of that discrepancy of tongues prevailing in different countries with the disagreeing floras and faunas of the same regions, each diversity bearing alike the unmistakable marks of Omnipotent design for the happiness and improvement of man.
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