Now please do not think of being ill this spring, and passing all your valuable time, wasting it, at a water-cure. I have really, as you see, nothing special to write of this week, and no time to read what I have hurriedly penned. May 26. Your letter on heterogeny is keen and good; Owen’s rejoinder ingenious. But his dissent from your well-put claims of natural selection to attention and regard is good for nothing except on the admission of the view that species are somehow derived genealogically; and this I judge, from various of Owen’s statements, that he really in his heart believes to be the case, and was (as I long ago intimated my suspicions) hunting about for some system of derivation, when your book came down upon him like a thunderclap. Wyman, here, is greatly pleased with Huxley’s book on man’s place in nature. I have not even seen it. Did you ever notice how prettily Iris is arranged for cross-fertilizing by bees, etc.? Your Linum paper has long been here. But I have actually not had time to read it. I might have glanced at it. But I find it best to read only when I can do so with some attention. Phyllotaxis: I have no notion in the world why the angular divergences should be of that series of numbers and not of others. Opposite leaves give (decussating) the angles. My puzzle has been to account for this system in cycles in leaves running into the system of decussating whorls in flowers (usually, almost universally). You will see the question by comparing in my “Botanical Text-Book” (not “Lessons”), pp. 236, 237, with chapter v., section 1; and you see I have drawn an illustration from it apropos to Falconer’s remark. But explaining the obscure by the obscure does not amount to much. As to national affairs, how quarrelsome you English are. Here are we, cool and quietly occupied with our little affairs, never dreaming of harm from you, and your people are trying their prettiest to pick a quarrel with us, because we do what Historicus says the English have always done and will do again when the time comes, having Lord Stowell to back them! Tell me, who is Historicus in the “Times”? An able and most influential person evidently. The government of England is now showing sense. Do not wonder that some wild talk is given to the air in this rough country, after what you have heard in the House of Commons, and read in the “Times,” etc. Am afraid we shall not like each other for a good while--the nations. But all shows I was right. We must carry out our little job, and hold the United States complete and develop material strength at any cost, or we could not live without eating more dirt than we like. Boasting nonsense is pretty well knocked out of us by severe discipline and sad reverses, but the determination is stronger than ever. Time up and paper full. Forgive my maundering, and believe me to be, Ever your affectionate, A. GRAY. June, [1863]. I am kept distractingly busy, so look for nothing of any use from me yet awhile.