366 



make some important additions to the genus Carina, 

 and have drawn up a synoptical table of twenty 

 species, of which I printed a few copies for the 

 correction of my friends, but which I am unwilling 

 to part with till I know your opinion upon it. The 

 tables of Hedychium and Curcuma, which I have 

 also nearly finished, will each of them amount to 

 about the same number, and most of the plants are 

 now growing with us. 



Accept, my dear friend, my best thanks for the 

 additional memorial of your friendship in the pre- 

 sent of your two valuable volumes of the " Cor- 

 respondence of Linnaeus and other Naturalists," a 

 work highly worthy of you, and which will always 

 be grateful to every true lover of science, and to 

 every pious and candid mind. Your anecdote of 

 the identity of the peach and nectarine, reminds 

 me of a circumstance equally extraordinary which 

 has occurred to us here respecting Hedychium. — 

 Happening to meet a friend in the botanic garden, 

 he informed me he had a plant in flower in his 

 hot-house, about five miles from Liverpool, which 

 he did not know, but which from his description I 

 concluded must be a scitaminean. With his per- 

 mission, Henry Shepherd and I immediately went 

 and brought it to Liverpool ; when it appeared to 

 us all to be quite a new species, wholly different 

 from any of those growing with us, and from my 

 dried specimens from India. The plant was not 

 more than three feet high, — the flower a dull yel- 

 low. As it increased freely by the roots, the plant 

 was afterwards divided, and several specimens were 



