£7. 71.] TO SIR EDWARD FRY. 731 
highest-class daily papers are little better than the 
lowest. I suppose the telegraph reporting for the 
press is all done by one set of men, and the more sen- 
sational the reports the more welcome to the papers, 
which, with few exceptions, print without any selec- 
tion or discrimination. 
I have settled down to my work with enjoyment, 
but with a growing sense of discouragement growing 
out of an embarras de richesses. It was natural to 
find here a great accumulation of collections of North 
American plants, all needing examination ;_ but unfor- 
tunately, they continue to come in faster than I can 
study and dispose of them. This comes from the 
increasing number of botanical explorers, and the 
new facilities offered to them by new railroads along 
our southwestern frontiers and other out-of-the-way 
regions. The consequence is, that while new and in- 
teresting things are pouring in, which one must attend 
to, and which are very enjoyable, I do not get ahead 
with the steady and formidable work of the ‘ North 
American Flora.” I begin to think it were a happier 
lot to have the comparatively completed botany of an 
old country to study, in which your work “were done 
when ’t were done,” and in which, even if it were not 
done quickly, you were not called on to do it over and 
over, to bring the new into shape and symmetry with 
the old. 
By the way, I finally wrote out an article on a ques- 
tion which you once treated, and upon which we more 
than once conversed, taking for my text a paragraph 
in Lubbock’s address at York last summer. I had 
partly promised Mr. Walter Browne to write it, so I 
sent it to him; and as a proof from the “ Contempo- 
rary Review” has come back to me, I suppose it may 
