It is difficult (as I have told Dawson) to conceive of the force with which arguments drawn from the absence of certain familiar ubiquitous plants strike the botanists.

I would not throw over altogether ice-transport and water-transport, but I cannot realise their giving rise to such anomalies, in the distribution, as Greenland presents.

So, too, I have always felt the force of your objection, that Greenland should have been depopulated in the Glacial period, but then reflected that vegetation now ascends I forget how high (about 1,000 feet) in Disco, in 70 deg, and that even in a Glacial ocean there may always have been lurking-places for the few hundred plants Greenland now possesses.

Supposing Greenland were repeopled from Scandinavia over ocean way, why should Carices be the chief things brought?
Why should there have been no Leguminosae brought, no plants but high Arctic ?--why no Caltha palustris, which gilds the marshes of Norway and paints the housetops of Iceland?
In short, to my eyes, the trans-oceanic migration would no more make such an assemblage than special creations would account for representative species--and no "ingenious wriggling" ever satisfied me that it would.

There, then! I dined with Henry Christy last night, who was just returned from celt hunting with Lartet, amongst the Basques,--they are Pyreneans.