Dr. E. Purkinje 



Weisswasser, March 10, l88l 



Dear Sir: 



I must ask your pardon for not having expressed my thanks sooner. Already on 

 March 2nd I received frora Mr. Focke the package which he sent. I immediately reported 

 its arrival to him, but I did not yet write to you, because I am very much surprised 

 at the material and not at all clear as to what it is all about. In the meantime I 

 received Picea a.janensis frora Amur and Ajan and am awaiting a shipment from Petersburg. 

 If now P. a.janensis is one and the same with P. sitchensis , as Pariatore thinks, or 1$ 

 P. a.janensis is distinct and besides sitchensis also still grows in West-America, if 

 finally other than sitchensis perhaps not an individual variety similar to ajanensis 

 occurs in West America, that hopefully the examination will show, but fcruthfully, some 

 of your sitchensis look despairingly similar to a.janensis , on the other hand a cone from 

 Sitcha which I received from Petersburg (without needles) is very similar to that of 

 pungens , for which magnificent cones I gave special thanks. 



P. Sngelmanni is a most remarkable pine, which has very much of the old worldly 

 to it, in regard to the structure of the cone scales and indeed mostly of the northern 

 and high-mountainous forms of P. excelsa , less of obovata . Now what is the pine given 

 out as P. alba , which Bourgeau collect ed in the Rocky Mountains in 1858? Because of 

 its location I regarded this variety with small cones as Engelmanni , but it is fundament- 

 ally different from this and is related to the new-worldly alba and rubra . Does actually 

 another pine of the Atlantic states occur on the East side of the Rocky Mountains? 

 Have you collected seeds of juniper, cypress and oaks in California and Arizona and 

 can one receive some of them, even a few? 



It will interest you that Viscum laxum which Boissier found at the beginning of 

 the forties in the Sierra de Guadarrama with Pinus silvestris and which one considers 

 a Spanish plant, in recent times showed itself as an abundant plant in East Prussia, 

 Mark, in Silesia and Bohemia (probably in all of Europe) yes that on the pine no other 

 Viscum occurs at all and that in countries, where pine forests are the only forests, 

 also no other Viscum occurs, as around Berlin. As soon as I have fruit and flower 

 specimens, I will send them to you fresh. Could one not try to cultivate European 

 mistletoes in American gardens and in Europe American Viscum , and Arcenthobium? In 

 Vienna one has artificially grown Loranthus and Viscum in Host's garden and according 

 to Fenzl it grew very easily. 



Recently I received from Hough works regarding projects to establish forestries 

 in America and wishes to establish forest academies. Will that be possible under 

 the conditions now prevaling in America? I doubt that a Company of wood-cutters, 



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