Fendler is with you, at least in St. Louis. Short is ready to advance something if he will fall to collecting again wherever you say. Get him some appointment with the army at Utah. That is the place. What is the good of your both being Democrats if you cannot get something for it!!
December 3.
Darwin asks me to find out if you medical men have ascertained or noticed any difference in liability to take fevers of warm climates, say yellow fever, between light-complexioned and dark-complexioned people of the Caucasian race. If you know personally anything about it, or where anything is published bearing on the point, kindly let me know, and oblige
Your old friend,
Asa Gray.
TO GEORGE BENTHAM.
December 13, 1858.
Boott writes in glowing terms of your paper on British flora and distribution lately read; and I hope soon to read it in the “Linnæan Journal.”
That the interchange of temperate species between North America and Europe has taken place via Asia is now a patent fact; and now the whole subject, and the probable explanation, begins to be clear to see.
December 31.
A happy New Year to you and Mrs. Bentham, and many thanks for your letter promising me your paper on Hongkong plants to print here. Pray give me passim any notes that occur to you upon Loo Choo plants, etc. I shall now soon be done with my Japan studies, and shall print a paper bringing to view curious facts of distribution, etc., and lay out a set for the Kew herbarium. How true it is, as you intimated, that the interchange in northern hemisphere has mainly been via Asia.