716 FINAL JOURNEYS AND WORK. [1881, 



American aster, Linnaean, Lamarckian, Altonian, 

 Willdenovian, 1 excepting one of Lamarck's, which I 

 could not trace in the old materials at Paris; and 

 Roper writes me that it is not in herbarium La- 

 marck. As to Nees's asters, most of them are 

 plenty, as named by him directly or indirectly. But 

 where, on the dispersion of his herbarium, the Com- 

 positae went to nobody seems to know, though I have 

 tried hard to find out. Have you any idea ? But he 

 made horrid work with the asters, and the Gardens all 

 along, from the very first, have made confusion worse 

 confounded. No cultivated specimen, of the older or 

 the present time, is per se of any authority whatever. 

 I am deeply mortified to tell you that, with some 

 little exception, all my botanical work for autumn and 

 winter has been given to Aster (after five or six 

 months at home), and they are not done yet ! Never 

 was there so rascally a genus ! I know at length what 

 the types of the old species are. But how to settle 

 limits of species, I think I never shall know. There 

 are no characters to go by in the group of Vulgar 

 Asters ; the other groups go very well. I give to 

 them one more day ; not so much to make up my mind 

 how to treat a set or two, as how to lay them aside, 

 with some memoranda, to try at again on getting 

 home, before beginning to print. The group now left 

 to puzzle me is of Western Pacific Rocky Mountain 

 species. The specimens you have collected for me 

 last summer, when I get them, may help me ; or may 

 reduce me to blank despair ! 



1 Willdenow's Asters were sent over to me here ! A. G. 



