I should like to see very much Forbes's sheets, which you refer to; but I must confess (I hardly know why) I have got rather to mistrust poor dear Forbes.
There is wonderful ill logic in his famous and admirable memoir on distribution, as it appears to me, now that I have got it up so as to give the heads in a page.

Depend on it, my saying is a true one--viz.
that a compiler is a great man, and an original man a commonplace man.
Any fool can generalise and speculate; but oh, my heavens, to get up at second hand a New Zealand Flora, that is work...
And now I am going to beg almost as great a favour as a man can beg of another: and I ask some five or six weeks before I want the favour done, that it may appear less horrid.

It is to read, but well copied out, my pages (about forty!!) on Alpine floras and faunas, Arctic and Antarctic floras and faunas, and the supposed cold mundane period.

It would be really an enormous advantage to me, as I am sure otherwise to make botanical blunders.

I would specify the few points on which I most want your advice.