92 FIRST JOURNEY IN EUROPE. [1839, 



and I assisted him in arranging them and selecting 

 for his herbarium ; in the course of which I have 

 obtained specimens of nearly all the Northern and 

 Oregonian ones, including one or two which have 

 come in recently, of which I have, when there were 

 duplicates, specimens also for you. The return num- 

 bers of those sent you were in many cases strangely 

 misplaced, and Boott has often been sadly confounded. 

 He has studied the genus very critically, hypercriti- 

 cally I may say; for he makes new species where we 

 should think there were too many already. We went 

 over Hooker's Grasses in the same way, and I have 

 obtained numerous specimens and much useful infor- 

 mation which we shall presently require. On Christ- 

 mas day Joseph Hooker selected from a large Van 

 Dieman's Land collection a suite of specimens as far 

 as they have been studied (to Calyciflorae), in which 

 there is in almost every instance a specimen for each 

 of us. . . . 



In looking over the recent collections from the 

 Snake country, and Douglas's Californian, I recog- 

 nized a great portion of NuttalTs, 1 but by no means 

 all. There was a single specimen of Kentrophyta in 

 excellent fruit; another of Astrophia, with neither 

 flower or fruit, collected long ago by Scouler and 

 mixed in with a species of Hosackia, to which genus 

 I am not sure that it is not nearly allied. Nuttall has 

 made too many Hosackias ! The copy of " Flora," 

 with my notes, has gone round to London, so that I 

 cannot now communicate many curious things noted 

 in the second part. But how did we overlook the 



1 Thomas Nuttall, 1784-1859 ; a great traveler and explorer. Came 

 to the United States in 1807. His writing's are intimately connected 

 with the development of North American botany. 



