I grieve to tell you that Adrien de Jussieu is dead. Cancer in the stomach, his tedious malady proves to have been. It makes a deep impression on the scientific men, and the public, too, in Paris. He was much my most intimate correspondent in France, a true friend, and a charming man. You know, perhaps, that Moquin-Tandon has succeeded the late Achille Richard at L’Ecole de Médecine. Tulasne, I suppose, will be the new professor at the Jardin des Plantes; at least he ought to be, as he is the most able man. No farther news since my last. Agassiz looks poorly and says he is not well.... I never could get Fouquiera up. To-day I have sown some seeds, and put on my own table, by the window, to watch.... 18th August. Agassiz handed me your note about the Compass plant. I took him at once into the Garden, to see Silphium laciniatum, terebinthinaceum, and pinnatifidum. He agreed there was no direction to be made out, one way more than another. The cauline leaves all tend to become vertical (as in several other Compositæ), but present neither face nor edge north. But three years ago Lapham of Wisconsin wrote me that, though the plant near Milwaukee showed no “polarity” (and so he never believed in it), yet on going farther west, on the prairies, he found it did generally turn all to the north there. If I remember aright, though, he said the surfaces of the leaf look north and south. You say the edges? How is this? Compare notes with Lapham.... What do you think I am about now? Revising genera of Myrtaceæ for Exploring Expedition collection. In these exotic orders I frequently find the genera so at loose ends that I cannot make the plants of our collection lie comfortably till I have given the genera a good shaking up. I should be tempted to do much more of this if I could work at Hooker’s, or in Paris. It is quite as well not, as it would cost no end of time.... I have found some Fouquiera seedlings up in the Garden. I am right about it; not Torrey. The leaf is not axillary and its petiole inclosed in the spine; but the spine is a hardened inferior portion of the petiole that persists, and from which the rest falls away clean.... TO W. J. HOOKER. CAMBRIDGE, August 3, 1853. MY DEAR SIR WILLIAM,--I will endeavor to get some account of Shakerdom for you. They are a queer people indeed. Manilla paper[26] is made of old manilla rope, which is largely used by our shipping. But what plant yields the manilla hemp for this cordage I have not the means of knowing, that is, whether the Musa textilis or no. I have been promised specimens of the stem of the plant, etc. But the climate makes our countrymen indolent there, and forgetful. I will ask for statistics as to the paper manufacture.... I shall be pleased to have you figure as many of our ferns as you can; and pray give names to all new species without hesitation. They will be more fitly named by the describer than by any one else.