be a tremendous work, and no
doubt very valuable (such a book, odd as it may appear, would be very
useful even to me), but I cannot help being rather sorry at the length
of time it must take, because I cannot enter on and understand your
work. Will you not be puzzled when you come to the orchids? It seems to
me orchids alone would be work for a man's lifetime; I cannot somehow
feel satisfied with Lindley's classification; the Malaxeae and
Epidendreae seem to me very artificially separated. (609/1. Pfitzer (in
the "Pflanzenfamilien") places Epidendrum in the Laeliinae-Cattleyeae,
Malaxis in the Liparidinae. He states that Bentham united the Malaxideae
and Epidendreae.) Not that I have seen enough to form an opinion worth
anything.

Your African plant seems to be a vegetable Ornithorhynchus, and indeed
much more than that. (609/2. See Sir J.D. Hooker, "On Welwitschia, a new
genus of Gnetaceae." "Linn. Soc. Trans." XXIV., 1862-3.) The more I read
about plants the more I get to feel that all phanerogams seem comparable
with one class, as lepidoptera, rather than with one kingdom, as the
whole insecta. (609/3. He wrote to Hooker (December 28th, 1861): "I
wrote carelessly about the value of phanerogams; what I was thinking of
was that the sub-groups seemed to blend so much more one into another
than with most classes of animals. I suspect crustacea would show more
difference in the extreme forms than phanerogams, but, as you say, it is
wild speculation. Yet it is very strange what difficulty botanists seem
to find in grouping the families together into masses.")

Thanks for your comforting sentence about the accursed ducts (accursed
though they be, I should like nothing better than to work at them in the
allied orders, if I had time). I shall be ready for press in three
or four weeks, and have got all my woodcuts drawn. I fear much that
publishing separately will prove a foolish job, but I do not care much,
and the work has greatly amused me. The Catasetum has not flowered yet!

In writing to Lindley about an orchid which he sent me, I told him a
little about Acropera, and in answer he suggests that Gongora may be its
female. He seems dreadfully busy, and I feel that I have more right to
kill you than to kill him; so can you send me one or at most two dried
flowers of Gongora? if you know the habitat of Acropera luteola, a
Gongora from the same country would be the best, but any true Gongora
would do; if its pollen should p