September 26, 1884.
So dear Bentham has gone,—not quite filled out his eighty-fourth year. Well, we could have wished this year of infirmity and suffering had been avoided. One would like to say good-evening promptly at the close of the working-day. But this we cannot order, so we must accept what comes. We shall miss him greatly. We have nobody left to look up to. He seems to have made a wise and good disposition of his effects.
Your two letters reached us at Philadelphia, on our return from North Carolina and Virginia....
Yesterday we had Sir William and Lady Thomson.[129] To-day Traill and wife (young and bright) of Aberdeen looked in and lunched.
I come home to a heap of letters and parcels and affairs, to keep me busy awhile....
Well, the meeting at Montreal was a success, and made a pleasant occasion. The influx of visitors from British Association to Philadelphia made that meeting very good too. George Darwin I just saw for a moment at Montreal, and Mrs. Darwin also at Philadelphia, one evening,—handsome and winning.
I hope you have got the copy of “Synoptical Flora II.” for your own shelf, through Wesley. Slips and omissions are already revealing, especially in the index.
I am wonderfully strong and well. Mrs. G. well up to average, both much set up by holiday, of which mine has now lasted a month....
What a deal you have fished out of Bentham’s earlier life! I thought you meant Toulouse, not Tours. Bentham used to speak of Toulouse and that part of France....
Among the inventive feats of his father was one I have somewhere heard or read of, that he made a fleet of articulated transport boats for descending the crooked channels of the Russian rivers.