
          Paris March 31st 1822


 Dear Torrey,


 Stevenson took me last week and introduced 
 me to [Alexandre] Brongniart & his son [Adolphe-Th�odore Brongniart] whom I have mentioned before. 
 Mr. Brongniart receives every Sunday morning his scientific
 friends in his laboratory where you find in course of the morning
 more than twenty different persons generally engaged in studying
 or comparing some specimen with specimens [on?] plates in 
 Mr. B's collection, and seated round a long table that nearly fills
 the room. He is a lively, amiable looking little man and received
 me very kindly. The son is a botanist and I had some talk with him,
 he seemed to know most of our authors on botany & admired [Thomas] Nuttall's
 Book particularly. They invited me to come again and I went
 this morning taking with me the minerals which you recollect
 I carried to England for Dr. [William] Babington, who had sold his Cabinet as
 I was told. The little man was quite delighted with them, he had
 received some things from Cleveland [probably Parker Cleaveland] & [Benjamin] Silliman, but none of them
 I gave him except three and bad specimens of those. By chance
 I saw the other day at the American Consul's the October No. of
 Silliman [Silliman's Journal, i.e. the American Journal of Science and Arts], & borrowed it. In it I found Nuttall's Memoir on the
 Serpentine of Hoboken, figuring [away?] the learned [?]
 of [John] Torrey & [James Ellsworth] Dekay. I gave the new names to my Hoboken specimens
 on the labels I gave to Brongniart. At the [Nemalute?] (which is I
 believe what we used to call [Amianthus?]) he shook his head, said, one ought
 to examine well before giving a new name. The Marmolite ([?] Talc?)

        