1881 f January 6th 



Port of Spain, Trinidad, W. I. TRANSLATION 



Port of Spain, Island of Trinidad, W.I. 

 January 6th, l88l. 



Dear Doctor, 



I have received your kind letter of May 2Jth of last year. I was happy 

 to hear the news of your intended trip to Oregon and California, since I see 

 that you are in good physical and mental health and that your energy has not 

 left you in your old age. Even though I recently received a letter from Canby, 

 I did not hear anything about your trip. All I know about it, fck is that what 

 I read in a letter from Gray of July 19th from Cambridge wherein he said that 

 you had arrived in San Francisco and went on board a steamer to Vancouver. 

 Since I wrote my last letter to you, we have had here an unusual wet period, 

 so wet that I could not do any plant collecting. However, I did not stay 

 entirely idle during that time, since I have been working for some months 

 in the office of the Superindendent of the local Botanical Garden, H en ry 

 Prestoc, helping him to figure out the average numbers of his fourteen years 

 of meteorological observations and to put them down, also those afxfckK for 

 the four previous years, in the the form of a diagram-barometer, temperature, 

 humidity, cloudiness and rain, on six sheets, each sheet containing the results 

 of three years. I finished this work during the last days of 1880. But it seems 

 to me that Mr. Prestoc might have more work of this kind for me. However, the 

 approaching dry season lures me into the mountains. I don't really know what 

 to do or when I shall start to botanize again. 



You asked wheter we have Vitis species here. I have four of these in 

 my collection which I gave Prestoc to determine. He confessed, however, that 

 he never studies this species very much, but fchat he thinks that one of them 

 is Vitis Caribea . Should there be an opportunity to send these to you without 

 great expense, I shall do so. But, I don't believe you Will find anything 

 new among them. 



My and my brother's health is good now and we are beginning to believe 

 that we are going to stay here and that we won't find easily a better area, 

 even though the climate is rather dry during the summer months and the people 

 could be a little less uncouth. We believe the reason our health is so 

 satisfactory is due to eating ripe oranges and boiled bananas (plantains). We 

 eat an average of 10 to 12 oranges, that is 5 to 6 per person daily. Also, we 

 have been preparing our own chocolate for the last two months from the cocoa 

 beans growing here which we buy for 15 cents a pound. We are now sure that 





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