52 Rhodora (Marcu 
Pringle writes from Vermont, Dec. 15, 1901: “The thought of going 
out alone again was appalling at first; but I am making up my mind 
to face the dreariness and peril. Pity my lonely life.” It is good to 
learn that, the plunge once made, things were not always so bad. “I 
trust,” he writes from Monterey in 1906, “that you can be grateful, 
as I am, for every remaining day of life in this beautiful world 
I have waited . . . sixteen years . . . to return to this 
Monterey region; and now I am rewarded by finding here the most 
magnificent flora I ever met with. Never a garden so gay with flowers, 
no field with so multitudinous species." It appears, if any evidence 
were needed, that botanists of a generation ago sometimes took 
nomenclatorial argument very seriously; and that they did not always 
admire one another. “ seems determined to keep his 
stupidity before the scientific world . . . I have advised the 
editor of his incapacity and conceit.” It appears, too, that they had 
their foibles. One collector, sending in two insignificant fragments, 
one sterile, for determination, wrote:—“ I alone am entitled to what- 
ever credit there may bein getting these ferns . . . If we discover 
a new Notholaena, I hope you will associate my name with it." 
Davenport submitted this letter and the specimens to John Robinson, 
and that downright gentleman replied, in phrases which seem the 
more emphatic in his bold handwriting:—“ The man who sent these 
specimens to have named would send a finger nail to an anatomist 
to get the name of the man or woman who pared it off. The man who 
would send such immature and fragmentary specimens to have new 
names has impudence worthy of the man who, having had a pair of 
boots given to him, asked the donor to black them for him. Give 
him fits!" 
As to incident, here is a pleasantly characteristic letter from D. 
C. Eaton, accompanying a specimen of Cheilanthes lanosa from New 
Haven. 
Dec. 17, 1892 
My dear Mr. Davenport :— 
Have a fern new to New England! and gathered within three miles of my 
house. Mr. Van Ingen climbed a trap rock cliff till he could get neither up 
nor down, found this fern, and waited till men let down a rope from the top 
and hauled him up. I do not think I shall try it—though I did climb clear 
to the top 42 years ago. 
Yours very truly, 
Daniel C. Eaton. 
Perhaps the most interesting of all, as they certainly are the most 
surprising, are a series of letters from William Stout. Stout was an 
