We got over here early in December, and here I have worked almost every week day till now, excepting one short visit down to Gloucestershire, and a recent trip to Cambridge, where, however, a good piece of three mornings was devoted to Lindley’s asters. I know the types now of all the older species of North American aster, Linnæan, Lamarckian, Altonian, Willdenovian,[117]--excepting one of Lamarck’s, which I could not trace in the old materials at Paris; and Röper writes me that it is not in herbarium Lamarck. As to Nees’s asters, most of them are plenty, as named by him directly or indirectly. But where, on the dispersion of his herbarium, the Compositæ went to nobody seems to know, though I have tried hard to find out. Have you any idea? But he made horrid work with the asters, and the Gardens all along, from the very first, have made confusion worse confounded. No cultivated specimen, of the older or the present time, is _per se_ of any authority whatever. I am deeply mortified to tell you that, with some little exception, all my botanical work for autumn and winter has been given to Aster (after five or six months at home), and they are not done yet! Never was there so rascally a genus! I know at length what the types of the old species are. But how to settle limits of species, I think I never shall know. There are no characters to go by in the group of Vulgar Asters; the other groups go very well. I give to them one more day; not so much to make up my mind how to treat a set or two, as how to lay them aside, with some memoranda, to try at again on getting home, before beginning to print. The group now left to puzzle me is of Western Pacific Rocky Mountain species. The specimens you have collected for me last summer, when I get them, may help me; or may reduce me to blank despair! TO A. DE CANDOLLE. VENICE, May 1, 1881, Sunday. As we propose to leave Venice to-morrow, I think I may say that within ten days you may look to see us in Geneva. The Hookers, with whom we have journeyed thus far, will proceed more directly home, after a day or two at the Italian lakes. We propose to follow more leisurely, and, if the road is fairly practicable, to cross the Simplon, and so to Geneva, where, according to your suggestion, we will go to the Hôtel des Bergues.... We have now been two months in travel, without respite, and for my part I am fairly sated. I need the change and rest which a week of botanical research in your herbarium, and of intercourse with its owner, will afford me.