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 65), he wrote to Hooker: "A man told me the other day of, as I thought, a splendid instance--and splendid it was, for according to his evidence the seed came up alive out of the lower part of the London Clay! I disgusted him by telling him that palms ought to have come up."