By the way, the fern I sent you last spring, and which you called Asplenium montanum, Willd. (a species I used to know well), struck the collector (Beaumont), as it did me, to be different. Pray collate, and perhaps figure it, as well as the ordinary A. montanum.

I was grieved to hear of the death of Adr. de Jussieu, with whom I have had a very pleasant correspondence for the last three years, and to whom I was attached as to no other Frenchman. His late letters were so cheerful and lively, and even hopeful, that the news of his death took me by surprise, notwithstanding the steady failure of his health for a long while....

We remember with interest that dear Harvey sets out to-morrow on his long voyage.

TO R. W. CHURCH.

Christmas Eve, 1853.

My dear Mr. Church,—It is a good time to remember old friends and to bring up, as well as one may, arrears of neglected duty. I have long unaccountably neglected to acknowledge your letter of the 24th August, and to thank you most heartily for the interesting volume of your collected reviews, which reached me a little earlier (I know not how it was so long delayed between New York and Cambridge), and which I have received and read with much pleasure, that is, all I have yet read. For I am saving the article on Dante for my first leisure hour. The first I read was the article on Pascal and Ultramontanism, of which I greatly admire the delicate and thorough handling.

I wish I could send you something of any interest. But I am not well enough satisfied with the elementary work which I use as a text-book for my lower classes to offer it; and besides that I have published, since last in England, only memoirs of the botany of our new western regions, one volume of the botany of a Government South Sea Expedition, etc., all dreadfully dry and technical.

I have been unusually busy this year, and am just now especially so, having to complete the preparation of nine lectures on Vegetation, which I am to give before the Smithsonian Institution at Washington next month.

I do not much fancy popular lecturing, and do this only to please a very valued friend, Professor Henry, the secretary of this institution. This over, I shall return to my regular plodding work at home, with great satisfaction.

I do not wonder that you feel a little nervous about the result of the experiment at Oxford. I can well understand it, and if I were an Oxford man, which I should count it a high honor to have been, I should share the feeling. I count it an excellent thing that the new enactments were framed by friendly hands, and are not very sweeping. As far as I can judge from the election of the present council, those of the Movement party by no means have it all their own way.