is full of interest to me, and I shall follow out your hints as far as I can.

I rejoice in furnishing facts to others to work up in their bearing on general questions, and feel it the more my duty to do so inasmuch as from preoccupation of mind and time and want of experience I am unable to contribute direct original investigations of the sort to the advancement of science.
Your request at the close of your letter, which you have such needless hesitation in making, is just the sort of one which it is easy for me to reply to, as it lies directly in my way.

It would probably pass out of my mind, however, at the time you propose, so I will attend to it at once, to fill up the intervals of time left me while attending to one or two pupils.

So I take some unbound sheets of a copy of the "Manual," and mark off the "close species" by connecting them with a bracket.
Those thus connected, some of them, I should in revision unite under one, many more Dr.Hooker would unite, and for the rest it would not be extraordinary if, in any case, the discovery of intermediate forms compelled their union.
As I have noted on the blank page of the sheets I send you (through Sir William Hooker), I suppose that if we extended the area, say to that of our flora of North America, we should find that the proportion of "close species" to the whole flora increased considerably.

But here I speak at a venture.