My dear Sir

Thank you for your expression of regret about my giving up the subeditorship of “Nature”.¹

Your cuts are all right. In fact I never availed myself of your kind permission to make use of those belonging to the Linnean Soc. My idea finally resolved itself into a plan for bringing out an English edition of Asa Gray’s charming little books “How Plants Grow” & “How Plants behave”; but Messrs Macmillan have not yet made the needful arrangements with Prof. Gray: & I think it now far most probable that it will never come to anything.²

Believe me | very truly yrs | Alfred W Bennett

C. Darwin Esq.

You may be interested in hearing that I am now engaged on a translation of Sachs’s Lehrbuch der Botanik for the Clarendon Press Oxford.³ I have just contributed to the Gardeners’ Chronicle an abstract of Hildebrand’s important paper on the Fertilisation of Grasses from the Berlin Monatsbericht⁴