Boott writes in glowing terms of your paper on British flora and distribution lately read; and I hope soon to read it in the “Linnæan Journal.” That the interchange of temperate species between North America and Europe has taken place via Asia is now a patent fact; and now the whole subject, and the probable explanation, begins to be clear to see. December 31. A happy New Year to you and Mrs. Bentham, and many thanks for your letter promising me your paper on Hongkong plants to print here. Pray give me passim any notes that occur to you upon Loo Choo plants, etc. I shall now soon be done with my Japan studies, and shall print a paper bringing to view curious facts of distribution, etc., and lay out a set for the Kew herbarium. How true it is, as you intimated, that the interchange in northern hemisphere has mainly been via Asia. I heartily admire your “Handbook,” and await with great interest your paper growing out of it; your experience is so great and your judgment so sound. As to English nomenclature, we can only approximate to a good system; the practical difficulties are too great, often insurmountable. It seems to me you hit the happy medium, if we must needs have popular name of the genus coëxtensive with the Latin one; but I rather doubt the advisability of that, and would use sub-generic popular names for generic, I think. Though “I do not much like” the whole thing, yet somebody must attend to English nomenclature, for better or worse; so I am glad you took it up. I hope you will study perigynous and epigynous. As to ovary, which, putting the important part for the whole, we have learned to use in place of pistil, it certainly is perfectly novel to me to hear the name applied to the gynæcium of Ranunculus. I am confident the word is never so used in De Candolle or Endlicher. I do not recall any instance of your using the word in any such sense; I am sure I never did. Where the fact of the combination is doubtful or ambiguous, if I said ovary, that would infer the combination; if ovaries, the distinctness. In Apocynaceæ A. De Candolle steadily writes ovarium or ovaria, according to the nature of the case. Per contra, you might as well call the column of Malva a stamen! For the collective term, I wish, in your paper, you would go for restoring to use the Linnæan term pistillum, and against the habit of using ovarium in a double sense, that is, sometimes for whole female organ, sometimes for its ovule-bearing portion. Pray do not add a third; and so when you speak of ovary in Clematis leave us to gather, from the context, whether you mean, (1) the whole gynæcium; (2) a separate pistil; or, (3) the ovuliferous portion of a pistil. Hooker calls my judgment about root and radicle “a flippant snub”! I beg a thousand pardons, and had no intention to be flippant or dogmatical, but simply to record a fact. For _mistake_, pray read _take_. My thanks for his letter of December 8th; will write him soon. February 2, 1859.