The new post-office law is an excellent thing, as it enables us to exchange our missives frequently, to send little pieces of news, and ask and answer questions without waiting for time and matter to fill up a formal letter.
I must tell you a little change made in my sanctum here. You are to imagine me writing at a sort of bureau-escritoire (standing under Robert Brown’s picture), which I fortunately picked up the other day for $10. It is of old dark wood a century old, and contains below four drawers, while the upper part, which opens into a fine writing-table, has eight pigeon-holes, six drawers, and a little special lock-up with several drawers and pigeon-holes more. You know I like any quantity of these stowaway places. I have sent upstairs the table which stood in its place, and brought down the round one, so that I have more room than before.
TO W. J. HOOKER.
October 14, 1845.
Your excellent father lived to a truly patriarchal age. Mine, who has been in failing health for some time, I learn to-day is suddenly and extremely sick, and I set out for my birthplace immediately, in hopes yet to see him once more.
His father died October 13, before he reached Sauquoit. He had made his son a visit in Cambridge after he was established at the Garden house, more especially to consult a physician for his failing health.
TO JOHN TORREY.
Cambridge, November 15, 1845.
My visit to Oakes[141] I was chiefly to this intent. You know that I have been waiting and waiting for Oakes to give, not his New England “Flora” (which I fear he will always leave unfinished), but a predromus of it, for my use and for New England. The consequence of waiting is that Wood[142] is just taking the market, against my “Botanical Text-Book,” mostly by means of his “Flora.” Letters from Hitchcock—and elsewhere—all point to the probability that they will have to use his book (of which, by the way, he is preparing a second edition, which he cannot but improve), and ask me to prevent it by appending a brief description of New England or Northern plants to my “Botanical Text-Book.” A plan has occurred to me by which this might be done, were it not that I will not tread on the heels of anything that Oakes (who has devoted a life of labor to this end) will actually do.
As something must be done at once, I have proposed to Oakes to make myself the necessary conspectuses of orders, analyses, etc.; to join the proposed thing on, or to dove-tail it into, the “Text-Book;” and also to furnish the generic characters, and he is to write the specific characters and all that for New England plants. I give him as limit 250 pages brevier type, 12mo (say 300), and insist upon having the greater part of the copy on the 1st March, and that it shall be published on the 1st April. That I may cover the ground of Wood, and introduce it into New York, I propose, if you think it right and proper, to add the characters of the (about 150) New York plants not found in New England, distinguishing that by a †.