My dear Hooker

I am glad to find you are safe home again & have not been eaten up by the Druses:² Your wife promised me the reading of your letters—but I never received any    tell her so. Tell her also that it was in the City “Maull & Polyblank”³ that I gave the Order—but also, that I have never yet received any copies myself—& have written to enquire why delay—& have got no answer. If she will use her influence with the wretches, perhaps then we may all get our own.

I dont want to bother you with further writing.—   I am going through Lyall’s N.W. Algæ,—meaning to print a list in Linn. Journal—but there are very few species—& of some, as many as 100 or more specimens.⁴

Cape Flora goes on slowly. Doing Crassulaceæ now— of which Sonder has a superb set—far and away better than yours & mine put together.⁵

In working out Cliffortia you will be glad to hear that I found some funny evidences of transmutation. I thought of preparing a short paper thereon—to show gradual passage from very unlike to same. Here is one. You know the genus has typically trefoil leaves.

	=
Well—	C. crenata & pulchella indent=4pc 2 lateral only
	C. obcordata—
	Now I find vars of C. obcordata going thus—

the larger & more uniform or orbicular the side leaves grow, the smaller becomes the middle leaf.—   Carry on the dwarfing far enough & you get C. crenata!⁶

I have also found a divarication in the fruit; from which I could draw a productive inference—as to genera arising from more than one species of old genus—whence diff^t. subtypes under one type.

Yours affy. | Quid Nunc.