KT. 61.] TO PRESIDENT ELIOT. 621 
pleted thirty years of service in the professorial chair 
to which I was called in the spring of 1842. The 
Garden, which had been under no professorial care 
for years, and which has since had a long and hard 
struggle for existence, the conservatories, the her- 
barium and its library, both steadily increasing, and 
now the lecture-room, laboratory, etc., make up an es- 
tablishment which has grown by degrees into one which 
requires much time, care, and anxiety to administer, 
and for which I have now done the main part of what 
could be expected of me or any one man. The ex- 
perience of the last and the present year clearly shows 
me that the work of instruction, steadily increasing 
in its demands under the present system, weighted 
more and more with the load of administration, is 
more than I can carry on. I have some warnings, be- 
sides, of the increase of years, which I ought to con- 
sider ; and I definitively propose to lay down, at the 
close of the present academic year, as large a part of 
this load as I possibly can without serious prejudice 
to this department and this establishment. I suppose 
that either the duties of instruction or of administra- 
tion, beyond that of the herbarium, must be entirely 
surrendered. If I can be spared, and if what I could 
do for the herbarium could be reckoned an equivalent 
for rent of the house I reside in, I should crave to 
resign both the charge of the Garden and of the pro- 
fessorship. There is reason to think that the time is 
at hand when changes such as are here suggested may 
be propitiously made. 
hen I came here, in 1842, I was carrying on and 
publishing a most important original work, the “ Flora 
of North America.” I have worked on it from time 
to time, but I never have been able to publish any 
