Remember Silurian Nautilus, Lingula and other Brachiopods, and Nucula, and amongst Echinoderms, the Silurian Asterias, etc.
What you say about lowness of brackish-water plants interests me.
I remember that they are apt to be social (i.e.many individuals in comparison to specific forms), and I should be tempted to look at this as a case of a very small area, and consequently of very few individuals in comparison with those on the land or in pure fresh-water; and hence less development (odious word!) than on land or fresh-water.

But here comes in your two-edged sword! I should like much to see any paper on plants of brackish water or on the edge of the sea; but I suppose such has never been published.
Thanks about Nelumbium, for I think this was the very plant which from the size of seed astonished me, and which A.De Candolle adduced as a marvellous case of almost impossible transport.

I now find to my surprise that herons do feed sometimes on [illegible] fruit; and grebes on seeds of Compositae.
Many thanks for offer of help about a grant for the Abstract; but I should hope it would sell enough to pay expenses.
I am reading your letter and scribbling as I go on.
Your oak and chestnut case seems very curious; is it not the more so as beeches have gone to, or come from the south?
But I vehemently protest against you or any one making such cases especial marvels, without you are prepared to say why each species in any flora is twice or thrice, etc., rarer than each other species which grows in the same soil.

The more I think, the more evident is it to me how utterly ignorant we are of the thousand contingencies on which range, frequency, and extinction of each species depend.
I have sometimes thought, from Edentata (70/5.

No doubt a slip of the pen for Monotremata.) and Marsupialia, that Australia retains a remnant of the former and ancient state of the fauna of the world, and I suppose that you are coming to some such conclusion for plants; but is not the relation between the Cape and Australia too special for such views?
I infer from your writings that the relation is too special between Fuegia and Australia to allow us to look at the resemblances in certain plants as the relics of mundane resemblances.