It gave us both very great pleasure to see again Mrs. Darwin’s well-known handwriting, and your signature.
I knew you would be pleased with young Agassiz and his Yankee wife. I wish his health were better; and I do hope your own will be such that you can next summer see and know my trump of a colleague J. Wyman.
TO GEORGE BENTHAM.
Cambridge, March 28, 1870.
... You hope that I will not resign my chair here unless to devote myself wholly to botanical work. What other object could I have in view? I am not likely to be idle, and I care for nothing else. The difficulty is, that the university cannot well spare me now, nor find a fit person to take either the whole or a part of my work, but there is a good disposition to favor my views.
Charles Wright is helping me as curator of the herbarium, and is getting the large accessions into it—rather slowly.
The winter is nearly passed; I have employed diligently all the time I could command, but the net result looks small. All I have for the printer is a revision of Eriogoneæ, which I have turned over to him, and which you shall soon see. I think I have done it very well. I have in Eriogonum made use of a character which you have not employed, i. e., the attenuation of the base of the flower into stipes, which marks the umbellata and the eriantha well, and I have increased the number of the sections. The species I have actually diminished from eighty-one to seventy-nine, although several had been added to those in the Prodromuses, and I have added half a dozen myself.
I should have written to you long ago, but as you would always have news of me through Hooker, and I had nothing special to say, I refrained. It is always a pleasure to hear from you, and I have no idea that our long correspondence should drop. I should have seen more of you and Mrs. Bentham (and my wife, too, regretted much), but you were much laid up with that sciatica, and we were dreadfully pressed at the last. Could we have had this winter in England, as we had at first hoped, it would have been well.
Torrey made me a visit in January; is well and happy, except that he gets only odds and ends of time for botany, and so cannot do anything to much purpose. The Eriogoneæ being a pet group of his, and his old sketches very useful in my elaboration, I have joined his name to my own in the paper I am now printing.
At the wonderful rate you are going on you will soon complete the “Flora Australiensis.” Happy and fortunate man that you are, both in the faculty of accomplishing work and in having your whole time for just what you want to do.