75

from Coulter

Botanical Gazette.

Museum of
Wabash College.

Crawfordsville, Ind., Sept. 17 1881

Prof. C. E. Bessey:

My Dear Sir:

Several of us have had
in mind for some time the publication of a
manual of Botany to take the piano of Gray's Manual
in the western states. Dr. Gray is too much
occupied with the whole of N. Am. to turn aside
& publish a more local work, but still there
are teachers of botany throughout the states west
of the Mississippi to whom such a manual
would be most acceptable. The idea is to
have such a work follow exactly the plan of
Gray's Manual, in fact be a companion to it.
Then as to range there have been two
plans. One is to take the Mississippi as
the Eastern limit & run west to about the
104th Meridian & south to the limit of
Gray's Manual extended west. That would
exactly take in beginning at the north, Dakota, Minn.,
Neb., Iowa, Kansas & Missouri. The other
plan is to follow the Mississippi to the