From William Jackson Hooker   8 January 1830

My dear Sir

I thank you much for your letter which I last received, your notes on Plants, your specimens,— & above all for your kind attentions to my young friends Monteith & Gordon. You have been a means of rendering their residence in Cambridge a very happy one.

I am quite ashamed to send you as I do now, a miserably small packet of Mosses & Jung ^ae. It is not that I have not many more that are entirely at your service, but such is the state of my duplicate herbarium & such my incessant employment with my publications that I really have not the time to look them out, & I feel myself indebted to you & many other friends in very many specimens of plants. Hopefully I have a prospect ere very long of not being so barren a correspondent as I have hitherto been. Otto of Berlin was here lately & I have adopted his advice of engaging a young man from Germany, who is to have the entire charge of the arrangement of my Herbarium; & costly as this is to me, it is absolutely necessary to be done.

It is my Cryptogamic collection that is in especially disorder; & as soon as ever my young German arrives he will be engaged in putting it into a better state where you may rely on it I shall select for you many others of your desiderata, if I do not have the pleasure of seeing you here & selecting them for yourself.

I have made a good use of many of your specimens & have copied many of your habitats; tho' in this latter particular the small size of my book does not allow me to be so exact as I could otherwise have wished.

I do not see any striking differences between your Geran. pyrenaicum from the South & that of the north. But perhaps in a living state they may be more apparent.

Your Chara from Bottisham, without fruit, I judge to be C. gracilis, a little slenderer than usual.

Your Lotus decumbens is truly so of Smith, & the Lotus tenuis of Waldsh. & Vit as you will see in Suppl. to Engl. Bot.: t. 2615:— but I doubt if it be anything but a var of L. corniculatus.

Your large Potamogeton from Bottisham fen I consider true P. natans, longer indeed than usual & quite distinct from fluitans of Smith & Fl. Lond. N. Ser.: now called rupescens.

The Pot. "natans var" you send me from Wilson is my P. lanceolatus & of Brit. Fl.– I have drawn up my character from his specimens.

Your very hairy var. of Lotus corniculatus, is L. cornicul. γ of De Cand. Prodr. & perhaps L. major β. Sm. in Engl. Fl. It is as good a right to be a species as L. tenuis & L. major; & no better.

Your little Gymnostomum I should certainly call conicum. It quite agrees with my specimens & my figure.

Wilson of Warrington will make an admirable Botanist. He has been spending the Autumn & winter in Ireland & has found many good Cryptogamic plants. Amongst others he has refound the most rare Daltonia splachnoides. At present I have only received a morsel from him which I share with you. I expect more soon.

Your's ever, my dear Sir | most truly & faithfully | W. J. Hooker

P. S. Miss Haldane is now here & desires me to say how grateful she is to you & M ^rs. Henslow for your kind attention to her & her German friend D ^r. Horn at Cambridge.