Berkeley House Weston super Mare
Nov. 22. 1900*1
My dear Dyer*2
Please look at enclosed from Fischer de Waldheim. His request appears to me to be unreasonable but before answering it with a "non possumus" I should be glad of your opinion.
This is a queer place, much larger than I had supposed. There is a splendid sandy beach some hundreds of yards broad, flanked seawards by a much broader mud-bank, which is supposed to affect the climate of the locality beneficially. I have got rid of my bronchitis attack. Dick's*3 whooping cough is relieved, &

Lady H[ooker]'s head has almost ceased drumming for the first time for 18 months & more. They tell me that Weston is notorious for its beneficial effects in such cases.
Except to Wells and Bristol we have made no excursions. The weather has been on the whole excellent, though cold and very windy.
My time has been occupied chiefly in endeav[ou]ring to construct a notice of my father's life from childhood to 35 years of age, I am woefully in want of material. I suspect that he gave most or all his botanical correspondence of the period to D Turner*4, with whom he lived for months at a time, making the drawings and analysis for the "Historia Fucorum"*5 &c. D.T. having put[?] him, with a great part of his fortunes into a

Brewery at Halesworth which he was totally unfitted (& disinclined!) to manage, led to the dissipation of a great part of the fine property which he inherited; to which must be added a rather reckless expenditure in travelling, London society, & the purchase of books on Ornithology, Entomology, Botany &c. &c. &c & on the British Jungermanniae*7, Muscologia*8, &c.
With love to Harriet & the children if with you (though no longer childs[sic])
Ev[er] aff[ectionatel]y | Jos D Hooker [signature]
I should be glad of some hardy perennials, Asters &c when the beds are being sorted -- do not trouble about Nama[?] -- I cannot keep them, my soil is so light -- that they have no hold.
We return to the Camp*6 on Monday