St. Louis, Ho. Aug. 5, 1882 



Bear Dr. Weber- 



I should have- answered your letter of June 10 lom ago, but 

 it was pushed off, sqeezed out by the daily business. 



First, it was a rai stake, that I positioned that Cereus in 

 Saltillo,it came from San Luis, where it is belng cultivated as Parry 

 writes - not wild, but commonly growing in the mountains.. The fruit 

 crets on the market as Petaya, mine came dried, but was quite ta^fey. 



To correct ny er^or and to clear up the matter as much as 

 possible, I send to you the Sketches of Parry with the request to re- 

 turn them. If we could obtain all those cactiwith dried specimens and 

 descriptions and drawings of the fresh specinens, we could soon. re - 

 cognize the speci.es correctly. But there remains always the difficul- 

 ty to deternine und er what names they appear with possibly pityful 

 specimens in cultivation and books by Pf eif f er, Sälen or others. 



Yes, I know well, that you wrote about Afrave Verschaff eltii , 

 but I considered the inf lorescense mich nore as a panicle contracta 

 rather than a spica exnansa; but. in the end it comes out to the same; 

 the question is, if Verschaff eltii does always h Rve such multi-flowered 

 short branches of the ear ("ear w ,like an ear of wheat,E.D. ) . With ny 

 A. heterocantha f^on West-Texas ( o^ which I received one of t v ^ese 

 days a f ine, live specimen. We are now 2 or 3 days by railroad frora 

 these areas and the South with several lines, of which at lea^one 

 reaches across the Rio Grande) - - thus, A. heterocantha is mostly 

 res-ularly gerainiflora ("gemini" Latin = twins, thus '•two-flowered* K. D. ) 

 And the original in Hunich flowered the same way ( I saw dried spe- 

 ciale r.s in the Hunich he r bar i um) but once in a while a twiglet seems 

 to produce k or nore flowers.and with this one specinen were snall 

 branches, broad, pressed flat,like with a true panl. T t s ? which had 

 up to 10 blossoms. I can send you. one, if you wan.t. At the same time 



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