1. In your remark as to the doubtfulness of paucity of fossils being due to coldness of water, I think you overlook that I am speaking _only_ of waters in the latitude of the Alps, in Miocene and Eocene times, when icebergs and glaciers temporarily descended into an otherwise warm sea; my theory being that there was no glacial epoch at that time, but merely a local and temporary descent of the snow-line and glaciers owing to high excentricity and winter in _aphelion_. 2. I cannot see the difficulty about the cessation of the glacial period. Between the Miocene and the Pleistocene periods geographical changes occurred which rendered a true glacial period possible with high excentricity. When the high excentricity passed away the glacial epoch also passed away in the Temperate zone; but it persists in the Arctic zone, where during the Miocene there were mild climates, and this is due to the persistence of the changed geographical conditions. The present Arctic climate is itself a comparatively new and abnormal state of things due to geographical modification. As to "epoch" and "period," I use them as synonyms to avoid repeating the same word. 3. Rate of deposit and geological time: there no doubt I may have gone to an extreme, but my "twenty-eight million years" may be anything under 100 millions, as I state. There is an enormous difference between _mean_ and _maximum_ denudation and deposition. In the case of the great faults the upheaval along a given line would itself facilitate the denudation (whether subaerial or marine) of the upheaved portion at a rate perhaps a hundred times faster than plains and plateaux. So, local subsidence might itself lead to very rapid deposition. Suppose a portion of the Gulf of Mexico near the mouth of the Mississippi were to subside for a few thousand years, it might receive the greater part of the sediment from the whole Mississippi valley, and thus form strata at a very rapid rate. 4. You quote the Pampas thistles, etc., against my statement of the importance of preoccupation. But I am referring especially to St. Helena, and to plants naturally introduced from the adjacent continents. Surely, if a certain number of African plants reached the island and became modified into a complete adaptation to its climatic conditions, they would hardly be expelled by other African plants arriving subsequently. They might be so conceivably, but it does not seem probable. The cases of the Pampas, New Zealand, Tahiti, etc., are very different, where highly developed _aggressive_ plants have been artificially introduced. Under nature it is these very aggressive species that would first reach any island in their vicinity, and, being adapted to the island and colonising it thoroughly, would then hold their own against other plants from the _same_ country, mostly less aggressive in character. I have not explained this so fully as I should have done in the book. Your criticism is therefore useful.