Thanks for your note. I have not written for a long time, for I always fancy, busy as you are, that my letters must be a bore; though I like writing, and always enjoy your notes. I can sympathise with you about fear of scarlet fever: to the day of my death I shall never forget all the sickening fear about the other children, after our poor little baby died of it. The "Genera Plantarum" must be a tremendous work, and no doubt very valuable (such a book, odd as it may appear, would be very useful even to me), but I cannot help being rather sorry at the length of time it must take, because I cannot enter on and understand your work. Will you not be puzzled when you come to the orchids? It seems to me orchids alone would be work for a man's lifetime; I cannot somehow feel satisfied with Lindley's classification; the Malaxeae and Epidendreae seem to me very artificially separated. (609/1. Pfitzer (in the "Pflanzenfamilien") places Epidendrum in the Laeliinae-Cattleyeae, Malaxis in the Liparidinae. He states that Bentham united the Malaxideae and Epidendreae.) Not that I have seen enough to form an opinion worth anything. Your African plant seems to be a vegetable Ornithorhynchus, and indeed much more than that. (609/2. See Sir J.D. Hooker, "On Welwitschia, a new genus of Gnetaceae." "Linn. Soc. Trans." XXIV., 1862-3.) The more I read about plants the more I get to feel that all phanerogams seem comparable with one class, as lepidoptera, rather than with one kingdom, as the whole insecta. (609/3. He wrote to Hooker (December 28th, 1861): "I wrote carelessly about the value of phanerogams; what I was thinking of was that the sub-groups seemed to blend so much more one into another than with most classes of animals. I suspect crustacea would show more difference in the extreme forms than phanerogams, but, as you say, it is wild speculation. Yet it is very strange what difficulty botanists seem to find in grouping the families together into masses.") Thanks for your comforting sentence about the accursed ducts (accursed though they be, I should like nothing better than to work at them in the allied orders, if I had time). I shall be ready for press in three or four weeks, and have got all my woodcuts drawn. I fear much that publishing separately will prove a foolish job, but I do not care much, and the work has greatly amused me. The Catasetum has not flowered yet!