92 BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 
taken the liberty of writing with a pencil, as my stock of 
writing paper is exhausted. 
In Mr. Drummond's zeal to transmit the earliest account 
of his botanical discoveries, he had scorned the tri 
fling disadvantage of possessing no paper which would 
bear ink, and had written the above letter, in pencil, on 
coarse whity-brown, tea-paper, which had travelled safely, 
the characters unobliterated, over a space of nearly half 
the circumference of our globe. Most persons would 
have considered the want of writing paper as a sufficient 
excuse for not sending a letter, even to a very shot 
distance. 
Swan River, May 13, 1841. 
In February last I wrote to you (on very inferior paper 
which I hope you excuse), and sent a small box, containing 
about two hundred species of plants, picked up on my retum ` 
journey from King George’s Sound. The plants which I 
gathered at the latter place, have not, I am sorry to say, yé 
arrived; and one parcel, which I had left on the road, Je 
reached me in a vexatiously mutilated condition, owing 8 
the jolting of the cart, and the very dried state of the spec 
mens. I was short of packing paper, and thus the plants 
have been broken almost to pieces. Since arriving heres E 
have purchased eleven reams of good brown paper, and 3? f 
preparing fourteen sets of our Swan River plants, which 1 
shall send home by the vessel which carries home our WO? | 
next season. 
Among those which I chiefly desire to transmit in good 
order, are some fine species of Verticordia; one, I 
having larger flowers than your V. grandiflora,* and ano 
truly magnificent species, growing eight or ten feet high, and 
producing flowers of an iron-red, or perhaps brown coloU 
* Journal of Botany, vol. ii, tab. 14. 
