286 RETIREMENT, TO 1897 : BOTANICAL WORK 



To the Same 



Feb. 11, 1895. 



I thank you for sending me the report on your Kashmir 

 tour, which has interested me very much, besides being of use 

 in giving me exact information as to the localities where you 

 made your collections, for many of which localities one may 

 hunt for ever in the ordinary maps and gazetteers without 

 finding them. 



I am in the middle of your grasses, by far the finest col- 

 lection ever made in Northern India. But oh how difficult ! 

 You have many more species than Thomson obtained. 

 The N. Western grasses differ more from the Sikkim than 

 I could have supposed ; but then I have no good Sikkim 

 materials. My June and July collections were almost 

 destroyed during the rains, living as I was in a tent of two 

 blankets, with no collector proper. 



I have been for nearly three weeks at Poa and am utterly 

 beaten. As to Nees's, Royle's, Munro's and Grisebach's * 

 names, they are all wrong. It is impossible to name Poas 

 on single specimens. Except P. persica (var. soongarica), 

 which is Royle's Festuca Amherstiana, there is not a definable 

 specimen in the genus, and I am at my wits' end what to do. 

 I cannot even sort the specimens ; your specimens leave 

 nothing to be desired as such. Indeed, but for their magna 

 copia I could get on well enough ; it is easy to sort collec- 

 tions of single specimens, but yours show such series of forms 

 and in such good state that they run all sorts of apparently 

 distinct things into one. I shall take counsel with Stapf, 2 



intendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden from 1869 to 1871, and in 1879 was 

 placed on special duty as assistant for the Flora of British India at Kew. He 

 returned to India in 1883 and served till his retirement in 1887,when he returned 

 to the Kew Herbarium and worked as a volunteer till his death. He contributed 

 largely to the Flora of British India, De Candolle's Monogr. Phan., Journal of 

 Botany, and the Journal Linn. Soc, &c. 



1 August Heinrich Rudolph Grisebach (1813-79), botanist and Director of 

 the Botanical Garden at Gottingen. He published his Plantae Wrightianae 

 e Cuba Orientali 1860-2, his West Indiens Geographische Verbreitung der 

 Pflanze 1865, Vegetation der Erde 1872, and Pflanze lorentzianae 1874. 



8 Dr. Otto Stapf, Ph.D., was his excellent coadjutor at Kew, to the value of 

 whose hints in the revising of the clavis he specially refers, and furthermore 

 adds (May 20, 1895) : 



• Stapf has worked up the Indian Poas, and after carefully revising his work, 

 I do not think it could be better done, but the want of definable, or constant 

 characters in the genus will, I feel sure, render it impossible to name a single 

 species by book alone, with any confidence.' 



