BOTANICAL GAZETTE. 



317 



GENERAL NOTES. 



Letter from Dr. Gray.— Dear Editor : You will be glad to know and 

 to announce to your readers that Dr. Englemann, who was, as the September 

 Gazette says, "quite ill at Strasburg," has returned to us in good condition. 

 When he came to us yesterday he showed no mark of illness nor lack of vigor. 

 Will you allow me to offer some remarks on your last issue? When a man 

 has gone, he can not control the publication of his letters, nor can his friends, 

 altogether. But I can imagine the distress with which the sensitive, modest 

 and cautious Dr. Torrey would have read in print the youthful letter which 

 your correspondent has sent you. I knew him intimately for forty years, and 

 I can say that this letter of his is uncharacteristic. How young and inexperi- 

 enced he then was may be seen from his statement that he and Mr. Knevels 

 (which you have printed Knevely) had not time to write a flora with full de- 

 scription of the region thirty miles around New York that year, " so have put 

 it off till next spring." 



Do you think that botanists will approve your judgment, pronounced 

 editorially and unqualifiedly, that " it was very clearly shown that what mux! be con- 

 sidered as three distinct species of corn hare been produced artificially/ " Is it really a 

 scientific journal in which we read— not the announcement of discoveries made 

 and laid before the world for judgment— but the announcement of discoveries 

 which are going to be made ? And in this wise : 



"Really he is seeing incipient species springing up under his own manipu- 

 lation, and can recognize the forces which are effecting the change. 

 Already has Dr. S. intimated certain results which will completely overturn 

 and tear up by the roots some of our preconceived notions, and one of these 

 days we may look for something startling." If I were in the place of the acute 

 and zealous experimenter in question, I should deplore this kind of announce- 

 ment, feeling that it would tend to create a prejudice against rather than in 

 favor of the discoveries I had made, or was expecting to make. 



Asking you to receive this volunteered counsel for whatever it may be worth, 

 I remain truly your friend — A. Gray. 



Dr. Torrey's Letter.— The readers of the Botanical Gazette are great- 

 ly indebted to Mr. Joseph F. James for the interesting undated letter from Dr. 

 Torrey, which appeared in the last number. There is, however, evidence that 

 the date assigned to it by Mr. James is too recent. 



1. The " Lyceum of Natural History in the City of New York " spoken of 

 in the letter, was incorporated April 20, 1818, but the society was formed in the 

 latter part of February, 1817. A prefatory note prepared by Dr. Torrey for 

 the Catalogue of Plants growing within thirty miles of New York, informs us 

 that it was reported to the Lyceum Dec. 17, 1817, in pursuance of a resolution 

 passed May 5, 1817. Dr. Torrey's allusion to "the society which we formed 

 last winter," and to this catalogue as then in preparation, shows that the letter 

 was written in the summer of 1817. 



2. The first volume of Elliott's Sketch of the Botany of South Carolina and 

 Georgia does indeed bear upon its title page the date of 1821, but we know that 



