18431862] GENERA PLANTARUM 28l 



To J. D. Hooker. Letter 609 



Down, Dec. i8th [1861]. 



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 

 Malaxese and Epidendreae x seem to me very artificially sepa- 

 rated. Not that I have seen enough to form an opinion worth 

 anything. 



Your African plant 2 seems to be a vegetable Ornitkorhyn- 

 c/ius, and indeed much more than that. 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. 3 



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, 



1 Pfitzer (in the Pflanzenfamilieri) places Epidendrum in the Lseliinas- 

 Cattleyeas, Malaxis in the Liparidinas. He states that Bentham united 

 the Malaxideae and Epidendreas. 



2 See Sir J. D. Hooker " On Welwitschia, a new genus of Gnetaceae." 

 Linn. Soc. Trans., XXIV., 1862-3. 



3 He wrote to Hooker (Dec. 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. ;} 



