I have some ideas about the best form for Latin specific characters, as distinguished from descriptions, as to punctuation, etc., which I wish to present to you. Perhaps I can best, and soon, do so by sending you proof-sheets.
The link which connected us with a former generation of botanists is broken. Jacob Bigelow, the correspondent of Muhlenberg[108] and of J. E. Smith, as well as your father, died on the 10th inst., at the age of ninety-two. Up to three or four years ago he preserved all his faculties. But sight and hearing gradually failed, and for two years he has been merely alive; at length the candle burned out.
The genus Bigelovia, which your father founded on one species, is now one of the most characteristic North American genera, of many species, chiefly west of the Mississippi.
J. W. Robbins,[109] also of Massachusetts, one of the best and oldest local botanists, died the day before, aged seventy-seven.
Engelmann (two or three years older than I am) and myself are now the oldest botanists of the country, I believe.
While I live I am always your devoted,
Asa Gray.
TO GEORGE ENGELMANN.
Cambridge, May 22, 1879.
... We go on a trip south to the mountains of Carolina with Canby, Redfield, and this time Sargent.