Dr. Gray was at work on another part of the “Synoptical Flora.” Asters had always been his especial study, and a great and puzzling labor, and these few lines tell of his difficulties.
We heard only incidentally of your accident, and were very sorry. Do be careful. Don’t climb ladders. Leave that to young fellows like me!...
I am half dead with Aster. I got on very fairly till I got into the thick of the genus, among what I called Dumosi and Salicifolia. Here I work and work, but make no headway at all. I can’t tell what are species and how to define any of them, nor what the nomenclature is, i. e., what are original names.
I will take this group abroad, but it will be just as bad there, unless I can get some settled ideas before I start. I never was so boggled.
To-morrow I’ll sit down and study your Pinus paper, which I have not looked at yet, so absorbed have I been....
My old friend John Carey has died, in England, at eighty-three. Schimper, they say, is dead. They go one by one!
First, thanks for your very lively letter of May 4,--auspicious day, being my wedding-day, thirty-second anniversary....
Yes, we mean to go abroad right after the meeting of American Association, say September 4, to finish Aster, etc.; to stay at least a year.
My wife sends best love to you, your daughter, and son, and I join.
DEAR REDFIELD,--If you hear of my breaking down utterly, and being sent to an asylum, you may lay it to Aster, which is a slow and fatal poison.
Apparently it will take a year or more for me to finish it, with the greater chance that it finishes me before that time....
Thanks for both specimen and sympathy. The former is here safely returned.
The A. glacialis I must seek in Nuttall’s herbarium, now at the British Museum.
The principal troubles in Aster are packed away, to try on again, in London, Paris, and Berlin.
MY HONORED AND DEAR FRIEND,--Is it possible (I fear it is) that your letter to me at the beginning of the winter (telling me who Balfour, M. P., is) has been all this while unacknowledged? I fear it is even so.
In the mean time much has happened, at least in your old world, on which interest centres; here not much, but constant and rather humdrum work for me. We have got through the winter, a mild one, in contrast to yours, so severe and trying, and our spring opens pleasantly; and Mrs. Gray and I are well and happy.