Do you know "Elements de Teratologie (on monsters, I believe) Vegetale," par A.Moquin Tandon"?
(319/5.
Paris, 1841.) Is it a good book, and will it treat on hereditary malconformations or varieties?
I have almost finished the tremendous task of 850 pages of A.St.Hilaire's Lectures (319/6.

"Lecons de Botanique," 1841.), which you set me, and very glad I am that you told me to read it, for I have been much interested with parts.

Certain expressions which run through the whole work put me in a passion: thus I take, at hazard, "la plante n'etait pas tout a fait ASSEZ AFFAIBLIE pour produire de veritables carpelles." Every organ or part concerned in reproduction--that highest end of all lower organisms--is, according to this man, produced by a lesser or greater degree of "affaiblissement"; and if that is not an AFFAIBLISSEMENT of language, I don't know what is.
I have used an expression here, which leads me to ask another question: on what sort of grounds do botanists make one family of plants higher than another?
I can see that the simplest cryptogamic are lowest, and I suppose, from their relations, the monocotyledonous come next; but how in the different families of the dicotyledons?
The point seems to me equally obscure in many races of animals, and I know not how to tell whether a bee or cicindela is highest.

(319/7.

On use of terms "high" and "low" see Letters 36 and 70.) I see Aug.