and see for yourselves, just a pleasant summer vacation, if you can leave Failand for so long. TO J. D. HOOKER. September 26, 1884. So dear Bentham has gone,--not quite filled out his eighty-fourth year. Well, we could have wished this year of infirmity and suffering had been avoided. One would like to say good-evening promptly at the close of the working-day. But this we cannot order, so we must accept what comes. We shall miss him greatly. We have nobody left to look up to. He seems to have made a wise and good disposition of his effects. Your two letters reached us at Philadelphia, on our return from North Carolina and Virginia.... Yesterday we had Sir William and Lady Thomson.[129] To-day Traill and wife (young and bright) of Aberdeen looked in and lunched. I come home to a heap of letters and parcels and affairs, to keep me busy awhile.... Well, the meeting at Montreal was a success, and made a pleasant occasion. The influx of visitors from British Association to Philadelphia made that meeting very good too. George Darwin I just saw for a moment at Montreal, and Mrs. Darwin also at Philadelphia, one evening,--handsome and winning. I hope you have got the copy of “Synoptical Flora II.” for your own shelf, through Wesley. Slips and omissions are already revealing, especially in the index. I am wonderfully strong and well. Mrs. G. well up to average, both much set up by holiday, of which mine has now lasted a month.... What a deal you have fished out of Bentham’s earlier life! I thought you meant Toulouse, not Tours. Bentham used to speak of Toulouse and that part of France.... Among the inventive feats of his father was one I have somewhere heard or read of, that he made a fleet of articulated transport boats for descending the crooked channels of the Russian rivers. I think you might have specified De Morgan’s discovery of Bentham’s contribution to logic, and his able defense of the reclamation, to which Herbert Spencer’s “Verdict” in 1873 was not particularly needed for the establishment of the fact. De Morgan was not a man to leave his work half done, especially as against Hamilton. I only regret that the length to which these most interesting matters extended stood in the way of your giving a more detailed account of Bentham’s botanical work, on which another article would be timely. I must now, before long, attempt something of this, for the American Academy’s éloge. And I pray you, if you are not doing it yourself, to send me hints and suggestions. Sheet full, and I will not begin another to-day, but add only my wife’s love to you and Lady Hooker. January 9, 1885.