If many (i.e.more than one or two) Australian plants are TRULY naturalised in India (N.B.Naturalisation on Indian mountains hardly quite fair, as mountains are small islands in the land) I must strike my colours.

I should be glad to hear whether what I have written very obscurely on this point produces ANY effect on you; for I want to clear my mind, as perhaps I should put a sentence or two in my abstract on this subject.

(70/4.

Abstract was Darwin's name for the "Origin" during parts of 1858 and 1859.) I have always been willing to strike my colours on former immense tracts of land in oceans, if any case required it in an eminent degree.
Perhaps yours may be a case, but at present I greatly prefer land in the Antarctic regions, where now there is only ice and snow, but which before the Glacial period might well have been clothed by vegetation.
You have thus to invent far less land, and that more central; and aid is got by floating ice for transporting seed.
I hope I shall not weary you by scribbling my notions at this length.
After writing last to you I began to think that the Malay Land might have existed through part of the Glacial epoch.

Why I at first doubted was from the difference of existing mammals in different islands; but many are very close, and some identical in the islands, and I am constantly deceiving myself from thinking of the little change which the shells and plants, whilst all co-existing in their own northern hemisphere, have undergone since the Glacial epoch; but I am convinced that this is most false reasoning, for the relations of organism to new organisms, when thrown together, are by far the most important.
When you speak of plants having undergone more change since old geological periods than animals, are you not rather comparing plants with higher animals?
Think how little some, indeed many, mollusca have changed.