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Ann Arbor. Aug. [14th?] 1880 My dear Sir: –
I have just received from your publishers in New York a copy of your new work on Botany and have partially examined it. Although my examination of the book has been neccessarily very imperfect I am convinced that it comes nearer the ideal text book of botany for our American College than any other one that has yet been offered. Sachs botany is too much of an encyclopedia, [?]'s too meager and my faulty in execution, so that I have bee obliged to abandon both of them as text books useful and indispensable as the former may be for reference.
So far as I can judge your work
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will meet the wants of our classes and I expect to introduce it in the Literary Dept of the University the second semester of the coming college year. During the first semester my work is with the Pharmacy students and a few advanced students of the Literary Dept.
It would not be right for me to attempt a criticism of the work until I have actually tried it, still I may give a frew impressions regarding it.
1 – The plan of the work is admirable, presenting as it does in concise and clear language the leading facts of structure, physiology and classification and bringing out more fully than usual the [sic.] history of reproduction and development. I have felt obliged to give my classes from year to year a course of lectures nearly identical in plan with this and shall now feel relieved [Page Break] by having a suitable work to which I can refer them to be used in connection with the lecture and which is within their means of purchasing.
2 – The execution though cabable of improvement in some cases (e.g. [?] 65 p 245) appears to me unusually [?]. The whole work is attractive in [journal?] make-up, the type [?] and the figures, as far as I have opportunity of judging accurate. On the whole Professor Bessey deserves the thanks of teachers of botany in this country for introducing what appears to be so good a work and it will doubtless meet with a kind reception at their hands.
You may possibly like to look over a syllabus of one of my courses of lectures, it is not however the one to which I referred above [?] of which I have no printed scheme at present.
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Kents Hill, [Ne.?] Dec. 20, 1880 Prof. Bessey: [?] yours of the 15 [just?] is at hand + I am glad to be corrected, I have the Portland Society's Cat., but it was away and the Portland people themselves say it is imperfect, so we do not look to it confidently for rare plants. So I looked up Gray's + Wood's Manuals, Sargent's Cat. of Forest Trees and the state Nat. Hist. Reports, and not finding [?] credited to [Ne?], I inferred that it could not have been heretofore reported or some of these would have recorded it. As I have already sent to Prof. Sargent statements as to the Kent's Hill specimen, I am not desirous of any further notice of that, but it may be well to call attention to the Waterville sp.[?] and the omission in the Manuals and Catalogues. Very truly yours, [?] H Stone.