sult. Dr. Daubeny has started
for Spain, otherwise I would have sent him some. Mr. Kemp is anxious to
publish an account of his discovery himself, so perhaps you will be so
kind as to communicate the result to me, and not to any periodical. The
chance, though appearing so impossible, of recovering a plant lost to
any country if not to the world, appears to me so very interesting, that
I hope you will think it worth while to have these seeds planted, and
not returned to me.

LETTER 577. TO C. LYELL. [September, 1843.]

An interesting fact has lately, as it were, passed through my hands. A
Mr. Kemp (almost a working man), who has written on "parallel roads,"
and has corresponded with me (577/1. In a letter to Henslow, Darwin
wrote: "If he [Mr. Kemp] had not shown himself a most careful and
ingenious observer, I should have thought nothing of the case."), sent
me in the spring some seeds, with an account of the spot where they
were found, namely, in a layer at the bottom of a deep sand pit, near
Melrose, above the level of the river, and which sand pit he thinks must
have been accumulated in a lake, when the whole features of the valleys
were different, ages ago; since which whole barriers of rock, it
appears, must have been worn down. These seeds germinated freely, and
I sent some to the Horticultural Society, and Lindley writes to me that
they turn out to be a common Rumex and a species of Atriplex, which
neither he nor Henslow (as I have since heard) have ever seen, and
certainly not a British plant! Does this not look like a vivification of
a fossil seed? It is not surprising, I think, that seeds should last ten
or twenty thousand [years], as they have lasted two or three [thousand
years] in the Druidical mounds, and have germinated.

When not building, I have been working at my volume on the volcanic
islands which we visited; it is almost ready for press...I hope you will
read my volume, for, if you don't, I cannot think of anyone else who
will! We have at last got our house and place tolerably comfortable, and
I am well satisfied with our anchorage for life. What an autumn we have
had: completely Chilian; here we have had not a drop of rain or a cloudy
day for a month. I am positively tired of the fine weather, and long for
the sight of mud almost as much as I did when in Peru.

(577/2. The vitality of seeds was a subject in which Darwin continued to
take an interest. In July, 1855 ("Life and Letters," II., page