Your Ohio case of law against marrying of cousins, I put to my neighbor, Professor Parsons, who had it looked up. He tells me there is no such law at all on the Ohio statute books, nor is there a trace of any law on the subject to be found in the laws of any State in the United States. He doubts if there can really be any statistics which tell on the point, because, first, the marriage of first cousins is a rare thing in this country; second, the United States decennial censuses do not afford any information on the matter; third, nor any of the [state] censuses that he knows of. Pray, don’t run mad over Phyllotaxis! I can’t save you, I am sure. George’s “Converging Sines” is the same, perhaps, as what Bravais was after. His memoir may help you (see “Botanical Text-Book,” p. 141, par. 248); or, if you want something thoroughly mathematical, consult Neumann, of Berlin, in some paper, which I have no reference to.... I am sorry you do not give a better account of yourself. Be careful and do not work too hard. July 7. My last from you is May 31. I had arranged to reprint most of Bates on Mimetic Analogy in “Silliman’s Journal,” but my long review of A. de Candolle crowded it out. I then thought of a brief abstract, but have had no time to prepare it. I wrote remarks and arranged long extracts of your Linum paper, and insisted on it for the July number of “Silliman’s Journal.” But it, too, was laid over, not for anything I had, for I have little in the July number. I like and agree to your remark that, in Bates’s Geographical Varieties, etc., we get about as near to seeing a species made as we are ever likely to get; and so believing, I think your gradual way more likely than Heer’s jumps. Apropos to Heer, you ask me if it is not impossible to imagine so many and nice coadaptations as we see in orchids being formed all by a chance blow. I reply, Yes, perfectly impossible to imagine (and much the same by any number of chance blows). So I turn the question back upon you. Is not the fact that the coadaptations are so nice next to a demonstration against their having been formed by chance blows at all, one or many? Here lies, I suppose, the difference between us. When you bring me up to this point, I feel the cold chill. I have been doing nothing but attend to my daily work, and had got so fagged that I really thought I was about to have softening of the brain, or some other breakdown. But a week of respite, caused by the death of an aged relative of my wife’s,--a dear old soul,--taking us away from here perforce, has set me up very nearly, and now after a week more comes my vacation, and we are off into the quiet country for three weeks.