«:t. 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, wliich 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., m^ke up an es- 

 tablislmient 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. 



When 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 



