716 FINAL JOURNEYS AND WORK. [1881, 
American aster, Linnzean, eae ae Altonian, 
Willdenovian,! — excepting one of Lamarck’s, which I 
could not trace in the old hea 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- 
posites 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. 
