RESULTS OF AMERICAN TRIP 217 



love for California, but all are full of great interest, and 

 wonderful resources. Niagara did not disappoint me nor did 

 the big trees. I travelled 7-8000 miles by rail and never 

 but once missed a connection ! but I did not like the cars. 

 The people I found to be wonderfully nice, and A. Gray is 

 a trump in all senses. 



To the Same 



June 16, 1878. 



I was quite as much struck as you were with the ' mature 

 aspect ' of Boston ; and not of Boston only, but of many 

 towns, and even villages in New England. Nothing impressed 

 me more with my ignorance of America ; and long before I 

 left I rallied the Americans on thinking themselves so young 

 a people when they were long past youth. It is only when 

 one comes to look close and finds the absence of any old 

 dwellings of a poor class, that one realises that all must be 

 new after all. 



A first conspectus of the general scientific bearings of the 

 expedition was given by Hooker in a lecture at the Royal 

 Institution, April 12, 1878. 



To Asa Gray 



February 25, 1878. 



Well done your hypothesis ! it is splendid. It fits in 

 splendidly to a Friday evening Lecture on our work which 

 I am to give to the Royal Institution on April 12th, entitled 

 1 On the Distribution of Plants in N. America.* You may 

 not know that the Friday evenings are reserved for the 

 single Lectures of Swells ! The Committee, who for years 

 have given me all the privileges of the Institution gratis, 

 had over and over again besought me to lecture, and I had 

 steadily refused ; but this time I could do so no longer. 

 I have made Meridional Distribution my principal theme, 

 and had intended to treat of Pliocene Flora, &c, and the 

 effect of the Alps as compared with the American Mts., 

 in the latter directing the course of migration, and in the 

 former favoring the extinction of N. Pliocene forms ; but 

 I had not come to the formulating of the subject as you 

 have done. I did not think so much of the Mediterranean 



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