How well Bentham still writes and works! Notice his essay on Euphorbiaceæ. You and Bentham have kept orthodox views of nomenclature at the fore in Europe, and I have seconded them here, so that, except among cryptogamists, heterodoxy makes no headway. 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. It was to have been done whenever Shortia blossomed. But that stole a march on us by flowering in April. So now we time it for the Rhododendrons, and will see Shortia out of blossom, and we hope to find new stations. Then I want to look up Darbya, of which only the male is known. Curtis seems to have got it, without flowers, near Lincolnton. Then we are to explore the east side of the Blue Ridge, from the base of Black Mountain to Grandfather, and then cross to the Roan, on which is now the Cloudland Hotel. Oh dear! now that the time draws near, I wish I could stay at home and finish Parry and Palmer’s[110] Mexican Compositæ, which abound with new or interesting species!... I send you by mail a copy of my new “Text-Book.” You see I relegate to other hands the anatomy, physiology, and cryptogamia,--glad to be rid of them. I send, too, one of the few copies of the Shortia paper. The translator into French in several places missed my meaning. And the explanation of the plate is a botch. I numbered only the floral parts I now furnished, expecting the materials from Herbier Paris to make another plate. Decaisne crowded all on one plate, and numbered to suit himself, and then printed my explanation unaltered. The numbers do not match at all.... TO WILLIAM M. CANBY. April 25, 1879.