TO JOHN H. REDFIELD.
July 1, 1876.
Dear Redfield,—I doubt if you know that the late John Stuart Mill, the philosopher, was a keen botanist. His herbarium, rich in European plants and with a good many Indian, etc. (small specimens from Royle, etc.), was given by his stepdaughter to Kew. But Hooker asked leave, after taking a certain amount, to present the rest to me, with leave to choose where all I did not care to have incorporated in the herbarium here should go to. I think it should go to a public herbarium, and as I think the Academy’s is not supplied well with European species of at all recent date, or recent collecting, perhaps it should go to you....
TO MRS. GRAY.
June 11, 1876.
... To get my train yesterday I had to leave the house at one. Dom Pedro till sixteen minutes of that, with Eliot, A. Agassiz, and two Brazilians. They came to the house, the door being open, and I received them in the library.... Sargent was with me to take him off my hands when I had to go. We treated him as we should any gentleman, though I believe I once addressed him as Your Majesty when flourishing the poison-bottle under his nose. He is a large, square-built, good-looking man of about my age, I think. Never did I have more questions to answer in ten minutes, nor questions more direct and to the point. Taken into the herbarium, he recognized what it was, complimented me by saying that my name was a well-known one (I suppose Agassiz had put him up to that), and I returned by saying that, in at least one case, we were members of the same botanical society.
“How many species of plants have you specimens of?” About 65,000.
“How do you arrange them?” Cases opened, and I began to show him.
“Please let me see some plant.”
I pulled out the genus cover first at hand, which happened to be European Saxifrages; opened. He took up a sheet.