2 



which simply says it will do its own way regardless of other people) . 

 However j any thine is better than anarchy and I really thinfe that we are 

 now in a fair way to have another international agreement. If the U. 

 S. , Germany , France and Italy can agree on a common practice in the na- 

 menelature of plants, Kew can go to : rass. There is a good deal of 

 work to be done in this line at the next meeting, for at the last we 

 only made a statt on a few general principles. 



Aside from the business which the large and representative at- 

 tendance rendered possible, it was a very plciesant meeting because so 

 many of the men that one wants to meet v/ere there. Ne^t year we shall 

 undoubtedly have a lot of the foreigners and most of our Pacific coast 

 botanists. We take it for granted that all of the eastern fellows 

 will be on hands. 



As you have doubtless seen in the last Gazette I have given up 

 the F.F.& G.work. It kept growing on my hands. The difficulties mul- 

 tiplied which I had foreseen in part. When I was working at Cambridge 

 I told Mr. Watson that I feared it would be impossible to include all 

 the plants that the plan contemplated; that the scheme of having only 

 the commoner cultivated plants, which was practicable when Dr. Gray 

 wrote the book, had become impracticable by reason of the rapid intro- 

 duction of new plants in these days. Independently , Dr. Sargent expres- 

 sed the same doubt, and by the time that I had finished the Legiminosae 

 I had come to this conclusion. I intended to come to Cambridge $ast 

 Christmas and talk the matter over with Dr. Watson ,bu t his sickness 

 prevented , and resulted so that consultation with him was impossible. 

 When therefore Pres. Eliot wrote me to know how the book was progress- 



