xxxvi NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
The whole of Spruce's Mosses — a group only second in his 
estimation to the Hepatics — were placed in the hands of 
Mr. William Mitten of Hurstpierpoint, for classification, descrip- 
tion of new species, and distribution ; and were all included in this 
botanist's great work on South American Mosses, published by the 
Linnean Society in 1867. In a volume of 632 pages, 17 10 species 
of mosses are described from the whole of the continent of South 
America. Of these 580 species were collected by Spruce, 254 of 
them being entirely new. For these figures and those of the 
Hepaticse I am indebted to Mr. Matthew B. Sclater (Spruce's 
sole executor), who has taken the trouble to extract all the 
necessary items from the two bulky volumes referred to. 
Spruce's work on the Hepaticse brought him a large corre- 
spondence from every part of the world, and for the remainder 
of his life he was sufficiently occupied with this, with the deter- 
mination of specimens sent him, and with a few special papers, 
among which were the description of a new hepatic from Kil- 
larney, in the Journal of Botany in 1887 ; and one of 18 pages 
in the Memoirs of the Torrey Botanical Club, on a collection 
made in the Andes of Bolivia. 
Turning now to the less exclusively botanical subjects, a few 
extracts from letters to his more intimate friends will serve to 
illustrate Spruce's habits and interests during the period of his 
secluded Yorkshire life. 
In June 1869 he wrote to Mr. Stabler with a characteristic 
joke on his own infirmities : " One day last week a dentist 
relieved me of four teeth, and I belong now to the genus Gym- 
nostomum ; but by the time you come over I hope to have 
developed a complete double peristome," 
In May 1 8 7 1 he writes : " It has been very 'hard times ' with me 
all this year ; nevertheless, I lately plucked up courage to disinter 
my microscope — after it had lain away out of sight full eighteen 
months, and I have gone thoroughly over all my South American 
Plagiochilas, have described all the forms, and have made up my 
mind as far as possible about the species. The result has been 
to make me more Darwinian than ever. I feel certain that if we 
had all the forms now in existence, and that have ever existed, of 
such genera as Rubus, Asplenium, Bryum, and Plagiocliila, we 
should be unable to define a single species — the attempt to do 
so would only be trying to separate what Nature never put 
asunder — but we should see distinctly how certain peculiarities 
had originated and become (temporarily) fixed by inheritance ; 
and we could trace the unbroken pedigree of every form." 
