
          New Bedford 7 mo [month] [July] 23rd 1831


 Respected Friend


 I send by H A Field a small parcel
 of plants collected in this vicintiy. The bearer of them has spent
 a week with us and leaves this place for Boston the day after
 tomorrow. He enters into the pursuit with all the zeal of 
 a new convert, and has attended diligently to the examination of
 the flowers of the fields, abating the time when his attention has
 been drawn away by the bloom & beauty of [inserted: the specimens in] another, an animated
 deportment of natural history. In the parcel which
 I now send, I do not that there is any thing very rare or curious.
 They are such as I have prepared for the East & part of the present
 reason as I found reason to collect them, and are now sent with the
 view that if thou should find any thing among them of which
 a greater number of specimens should be wanted, I would take
 some care to procure them, if I could know which they were.
 I should be glad to preserve and send then [inserted: further] specimens of any
 plant that may be designated which grows in this neighbourhood,
 but I find it encroaches too much on my time to attempt to
 make a general collection of all the plants [as?] [?], without
 knowing what you have not & may want, and my attention to
 Botany has been so entirely confined to one section of the country
 thus I hardly know what does or does not grow in any other.

        