BIOGRAPHY 
xli 
former Governor-General of India, and I did not hesitate to put 
him through his catechism on Indian matters ; but I cannot here 
detail his views and opinions : they were very different from those 
of Lords Lytton and Beaconsfield." 
In Nov. 1875 he writes: "I have just been writing five 
long letters for M. Andre to take to South America. He starts 
on the 7th, and goes direct to Loja and the Equatorial Andes." 
M. Andre is the well-known French botanist and enthusiastic 
traveller and plant-collector. 
The following note is of interest : — " I am sorry to hear of 
Lindberg's sufferings in the head and eyes. I had the same thing 
myself for months in South America, and from a similar cause. 
I had had some smoking-caps made of black satin, lined with 
red silk. The red dye came out and stained my forehead, but 
it was long ere I found out that it was really causing the atrocious 
pains which almost drove me crazy. Perhaps I swore about it 
in Spanish quite as emphatically as Lindberg does in English." 
The following extract from a letter of April 23, 1886, shows 
how well he could introduce that rather rare thing, an appropriate 
yet unhackneyed quotation : — " I was very sorry to hear of poor 
Bishop Hannington's death — botanical bishops are so rare ! We 
once had one, however — Dr. Goodenough, Bishop of Carlisle, 
whose monograph of British Carices is still a classic. Though 
so sound a botanist (and divine, I presume), he was a dreary 
preacher. Once on a time he had had to preach to the peers, 
and Peter Pindar wrote of him : 
'Twas well enough that Goodenough before the Lords should preach, 
But sure enough full bad enough for those he'd got to teach." 
After Spruce's work on the Hepaticse was published, he was 
occupied from 1889 to 1892 in the very tedious but to him 
interesting task of sorting out his immense collection of South 
American Hepaticae into sets of species for distribution, writing 
labels for names, etc, the whole of which was completed and 
twenty-five sets sent off before the end of the year. The first 
four sets contained 493 species each, and the first eleven over 
400, while the last five were reduced to about 200 or 300, showing 
the rarity of many of these delicate little plants, which were often 
found only once, and then perhaps in minute patches, either 
mixed with or growing upon other species. 
The following extracts from his two last letters (the second 
written within two months of his death) show that his interest 
in botany continued to the last. 
On October 27, 1892, he wrote to Mr. Stabler: "Last 
