TALBOT782

Halesworth.
Oct. 24^th 1817.

My dear Sir

It is long since I received your last letter, but I am not even now able to reply to that part of it where you ask me to let you know who is to be the publisher of the Musc. Brit. ¹ This however I shall soon determine, for the last sheet has been printed some time; but I wait for two or three plates before it can be completed. The price I apprehend will be 2g^s. Yet even this will not pay unless more copies are sold, that we can calculate upon. The cost of 32 plates & those very laborious ones is no trifling expense. My Humboldtian Mosses ² will be published but in another form. I had not more than 16 Subscribers to the N^o already published & I have come to the resolution to incorporate them with other foreign Mosses & publish them in a cheaper form ³ & of an Octavo size, with the plates uncolored in periodical Numbers. Some of the plates are already Engraved for this purpose & I if I can get a sufficient number of Subscribers it will be published regularly. I sometimes think of not confining it to Mosses but of including the Jungermanniæ, Lichens &c –: All this however must depend upon the success it meet with.

M^r Dawson Turner ⁴ has never yet published a book on the Lichens ⁵, nor Mr Borrer ⁶ either; but they have long commenced one in conjunction. When it will appear I cannot say it having been for some time laid on the shelf.

You are now I presume in a country that is almost new to the Botanist & I hope you have occasionally leisure & inclination to devote to excursions in pursuit of Mosses. If you meet with anything new or rare I should be happy to be made a partaker of your discoveries; & the more so as I am collecting materials for the Flora Londinensis, ⁷ which is now going on with spirit again, after a lapse of some time. There will be two numbers of it published the first of next month; one of the old & the other of the new Series.

I am, my dear Sir,Very truly & faithfully yours

W. J. Hooker.

W. H. F. Talbot Esq.
Rev. M^r Bonneys ⁸
Normanton
Stamford
Trinity College ⁹
Cambridge