xxxviii NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
just resumed microscopic work again, for in the very cold weather 
I had to give it up. But I have gone completely through all my 
South American Hepaticae, and have selected and classified type- 
specimens for ulterior analysis. In Lejeunea alone — in its widest 
sense, that is, including Phragmicoma, etc. — I have no fewer than 
460 'forms.' I have also gone over all my old European her- 
barium and have brushed away the excreta of destructive insects, 
so that (except to myself) the signs of their ravages are now 
scarcely apparent." 
Again in October 1873 : "I hammer away, as well as I can, 
at Lejeuneas and their relatives. It serves to beguile pain ; 
whether it will ever be completed, time will show." 
More than a year later, in December 1874, he writes: "My 
work is now limited to chewing the cud of partially digested obser- 
vations made during the past summer — indicating under what 
difficulties and painful conditions he continued to labour at the 
great work (and enjoyment) of his life — the minute and exhaus- 
tive study of the Hepaticae. It was about this time that his long 
correspondence with Mr. Daniel Hanbury was brought to a close 
by the lamented death of his friend. The following extracts from 
some of Spruce's latest letters to him are of general interest : — 
Richard Spruce to Da?nel Hanbury 
"Welburn, Feb. 10, 1873." 
[In reply, apparently, to some depreciatory remarks upon his 
favourite Hepatics, Spruce writes as follows : — ] 
"The Hepaticse are by no means a 'little family.' They are 
so abundant and beautiful in the tropics, and in the Southern 
Hemisphere generally, that I think no botanist could resist the 
temptation to gather them. In equatorial plains, one set creeps 
over the living leaves of bushes and ferns, and clothes them w4th 
a delicate tracery of silvery-green, golden, or red-brown ; and 
another set, along with mosses, invests the fallen trunks of old 
trees. In the Andes they sometimes hang from the branches of 
trees in masses that you could not embrace with your arms. I 
have some species with a stem half a yard long, and others so 
minute that six of them grow and fruit on a single leaflet of 
an Acrostichum. Then, as to number and variety, I suppose 
that the working up of my South American Hepaticse may entail 
equal labour to that of monographing the world's Rubiaceae. In 
the largest genus, Lejeunea, I have not merely thousands of 
specimens, but thousands of papers covered with specimens ; and 
