
          My dear Sir

I received with very great pleasure your favor of the 26th
June. It was a great gratification to me to have so good an opportunity
of receiving a correspondence always interesting to me and
which accident and procrastinating temper on my part had contributed
to interrupt. It is [?]  now to look back. I wrote but while
endeavouring to collect [crossed out : ?] plants or hoping to receive some which
I might send you time passed away and I found myself defaulted
without having an excuse for my silence. I have been waiting for
some time past for the publication of two new numbers of my work
the 9th & 10th (which are now actually printed but not published) to
afford me an opportunity of writing. But your letter has relieved
me from that difficulty.

You can scarcely imagine how much I am confined & may
[?] imprisoned by [crossed out : bu?] avocations with which I cannot dispense.
I sometimes for two or three months together do not go beyond the
limits of the city, and the number of botanists or [?]
lovers of botany in this country is I fear constantly diminishing.
Hence the great difficulties I find in collecting plants to maintain
interchanges with my friends, and the mortification to which I
am constantly exposed of having, [added : nothing] to return to those from whom
I have received much and the necessity under which I have been
placed of declining many offers of foreign correspondence that
        