MY DEAR DARWIN,--Being eve of post-day we respond at once to yours of the 27th January--which arrived this very morning--lest you should send us down to posterity with a fabulous dog-story. I well remember telling you of our “Max”[85] and his habit of washing cat-fashion; which you suggested might have come from being brought up with a cat, and I think I told you that I had not been able to learn definitely whether that was the case or no. Here, you see, by some shuffling of memory, a suggestion of what might explain a fact has taken the place of the fact itself. I am curious to know if it be true, for it is the only explanation I can think of. I trust you have some of the slender-leaved Drosera I sent through Hooker. Well, our homeward voyage was not a nice one, especially for Mrs. Gray, and it now seems a long time ago. I dropped at once into a world of work; but am not killing myself. The main struggle for existence will come in the spring, when my duties crowd on me dreadfully. It gave us both very great pleasure to see again Mrs. Darwin’s well-known handwriting, and your signature. I knew you would be pleased with young Agassiz and his Yankee wife. I wish his health were better; and I do hope your own will be such that you can next summer see and know my trump of a colleague J. Wyman. TO GEORGE BENTHAM. CAMBRIDGE, March 28, 1870. ... You hope that I will not resign my chair here unless to devote myself wholly to botanical work. What other object could I have in view? I am not likely to be idle, and I care for nothing else. The difficulty is, that the university cannot well spare me now, nor find a fit person to take either the whole or a part of my work, but there is a good disposition to favor my views. Charles Wright is helping me as curator of the herbarium, and is getting the large accessions into it--rather slowly. The winter is nearly passed; I have employed diligently all the time I could command, but the net result looks small. All I have for the printer is a revision of Eriogoneæ, which I have turned over to him, and which you shall soon see. I think I have done it very well. I have in Eriogonum made use of a character which you have not employed, i. e., the attenuation of the base of the flower into stipes, which marks the umbellata and the eriantha well, and I have increased the number of the sections. The species I have actually diminished from eighty-one to seventy-nine, although several had been added to those in the Prodromuses, and I have added half a dozen myself.