Boston. Wednesday, July 10*1 [18]77.
Dearest Hyacinth*2 I wrote to you ten two? days ago from Prof[essor] Asa Gray's, directing to Boulogne, from whence I presume that you have ere this returned, and I hope that this may find you at Pendock. I have had very hard work seeing sights and people and am fairly tired out, so that I shall be glad to be tomorrow afternoon at rest in a steamer bound to New York, on my way to the far West. The weather has not been roasting but broiling, steamy and muggy, most relaxing and one gets covered with perspiration by sitting still ! so you may guess the state I have been in when running about from morning till night. I left the Grays' yesterday and came here to Mr Sargent's, a beautiful property about 4 miles out of Boston, and am in a most comfortable and elegantly furnished house with hospitable host and hostess. Mr S. and his wife were often at Kew 3 1/2 years ago, and spent some days with me. He has charge of the Botanical Garden at Harvard University and of a magnificent Park, called the "Arnold Arboretum" here, which is not yet laid out, but is the Kew of Boston. Mr S. himself is heir to a large property upon which he lives in good style and has given up two days to take me about.

The Stracheys are at a Hotel in Boston, and as we are invited to breakfast, lunch, dinner and tea at the same places, more or less, we are much together. I find Mrs S. a most kind and considerate person, and every one here is charmed with her; her manner notwithstanding. All which does not prevent your being most aw-fully missed, and I am sure that but for the fatigue and heat you would have enjoyed Boston much. It is a very pretty place indeed and the scenery round about most lovely. The streets of dwelling houses are broad, lined with trees in the town and in the outskirts, and the dwelling houses very large, comfortable and handsome. In the suburbs the roads are wide, the houses chiefly of wood very pretty, much varied in form and construction, often very large and in excellent taste, more French than English and stand in open plots of garden ground. There are neither walls nor hedges to the road, but low, light, wooden fences, and the roads being excellent and lined with trees, the drives are most attractive. The contour of the ground is in swelling hills of glacial drift, well wooded and very lovely, with intervening well watered meadows, and many streams. There are no evergreens but conifers; but shrubs and flowers of various kinds abound and of trees the variety is very great: Hickory, American Ash, Elms and Maples of 2 kinds prevail, with four Oaks; also here and there English Elms, Horse chestnuts, Limes and Poplars. There is a broad belt of grass on either side the footpaths which are always clean and well kept. Indeed the thorough good keep of the roads and houses, ships, pack carriages,

and conveyances of all kinds, and the cleanness and comfort of the laboring classes is a most striking and satisfactory feature. Coachmen and railway guards look and speak like gentlemen. In the market the butcher is as clean as the grocer, betraying no disagreeable features of his trade in apron, hands or head! The horses and public vehicles are like private carriages, and are infinitely more varied in kind and more comfortable than ours. Every one can read and is well educated; the people are handsome on the average, though sharp featured and never high complexioned. The shops are quite like our own, and the people very civil. Everything is very dear indeed, as much so as in England London, except fruit, which is plentiful. Bananas are imported in enormous quantities from W[est] Indies, but are not near so good as Kew ones. Wild raspberries and bramble and blaeberries[sic], all of several kinds are sold in the markets. The nasal twang is very decided but not so unpleasant as in other parts of America, and we are warned that we shall not find other parts of the States so pleasant every way as Massachusetts, which has been settled since 1620. Hitherto we have had no plagues of mosquitoes or flies, but then we are told that the season is quite exceptional for prevalence of rain and absence of sun heat. I should however prefer a roasting sun to this relaxing, muggy, damp heat. Monday was spent chiefly at the University buildings &c., which consist of blocks of buildings, some excellent, others old fashioned, scattered over 70 acres of wooded lawns. I should mention that the

lawns are as green as in England and as often mown, but they are generally burnt up at this season. Most families are at the sea-side or at their country villas in the suburbs. The public park is beautifully planted and kept, public statues abound --to Washington and the people who fell in the late war. Every county of the States has a tall flagstaff on the common or where crossroads meet and a monument to the heroes of the county who fell in the late war; often in poor taste, but I have seen no revolting ones, or so barbarous as the Wallace monument at Stirling. Yesterday we went to Belvidere, a district on the sea coast some 20 miles N[orth] of Boston where Mrs Gray's*4 relations have large property. The coast there is rocky, (granitic) facing the cool S[outh] E[ast] winds -- always cool over the Atlantic -- and the scenery is most lovely overlooking Boston Harbour. The vegetation is quite Scotch, the ground covered with Cypripedia, Vaccinia, Pyrolas, Orchis and heaps of such plants; the copses full of roses, brambles, raspberries and flowering shrubs, and the trees a mixture of Pines, Hemlock, Juniper, Spr[uce?]*4 and deciduous trees. Ferns and Mosses abound, and you might fancy yourself, but for the absence of Heaths, in Scotland or Wales. Returning we stopped at Salem (Read Hawthorn's "House with 7 Gables", any bookstall has it) to see a Museum and Nat[ural] Hist[ory] Institute endowed by Peabody*5. We found the Professor teaching a mixed class of males and females Zoology, the pupils were school teachers (and a few amateurs) who came from various States during the vacation for 2 months at their own expense. They have an hour's lecture at 10-11A.M., and spend

the day till 4 in the class room, dissecting and making drawings and notes under the eyes of the teacher and an assistant. One was dissecting a star-fish,another a frog and a third a Scolopendrium. I was introduced to 5 of the young (and old) women, -- all knew of Kew and of some of my own and my father's works, having had a similar course of Botany at Harvard the previous year. I saw this Botany class the day before, working under the eye of Dr Gray's assistant, and examined some of the girls' papers, taking them promiscuously from before them. Black-boards were hung up all round with sentences in English, French and Latin from Linnaeus, Cuvier, &c., &c., which they are called upon to translate and illustrate. The thirst for knowledge in this State is most wonderful, and the State schools are allowed on all hands to be admirable through this thorough method of teaching and the subordinating the lecturing to practical work on the subjects lectured on that alone will ever make good teachers. Today I spent the forenoon in Mr Sargent's*6 grounds, the Arnold Arboretum and Forest hill country. Mr Sargent’s dairy is quite unique -- the milk-cans &c., are arranged on two tiers of shelves, or rather of horizontally laid pipes as thick as your wrist. These pipes, of which 4 in a row form a shelf, run round the dairy, they are silvered and kept very bright; on the top row is a shallow square pan about a yard long and as broad, standing on the row of pipes, in which pan were two magnificent square blocks of ice. Openings in the base of the pan communicate with the pipes of the top row and then with those of the row below, and the cold water flowing through the pipes keeps the dairy cool in the summer,

In winter, hot water from a boiler in an adjoining apartment is let into the same pipes and thus a tolerably uniform temperature of about 60 0 is kept up summer and winter. The plan is all Mr Sargent' s own. I wonder if Mr Smith*7 knows of any such. Forest Hill Cemetery is a wonder and a specimen of the town Cemeteries of the U.S. They belong to Chartered Corporations which expend the proceeds of the sale of burial plots on the beautifying of the grounds. It is as large as Kensal Green, occupies a hilly slope of turf and grass, with projecting bosses of Granite and other rocks; it is intersected by broad well kept roads, and the whole is a most lovely garden, to which our parks are a mere joke. The burial plots are all bounded by granite kerbs and the tombs and monuments of white marble throughout. The Lawns are more perfectly kept than Kew, and there are every where masses of flowers and flowering shrubs most beautiful to behold. The rocks are covered with creepers of all kinds, masses of Sedum, Pinks, Pansies and Lysimachia, with here and there scarlet Begonias, Arums, Tree ferns, Dracenias, and subtropical plants, not clumsily lumped or tastelessly scattered, as at our Parks, but arranged in perfect taste and order. Here and there at corners are pattern beds (carpet beds) incomparably better than ours, and the white gates, roads, kerbs and tombs so clean that you may literally eat your dinner off them. The prevalence of white marble tombs, chapels, shrines, tablets, grave-stones, and especially statues (life size) is the great defect. These should be in

granite, serpentine, or other colored stones. The sums of money expended by the friends of the deceased on their statues must be enormous. Of course many are in poor taste, but I saw none so horrid as in our English Cemeteries. I never saw Natural features so happily made use of as in this country. Then we went to a Mr Hunnewell's, about 5 miles off, at a place called Wellesley. He is very wealthy and has a magnificent property bordering a considerable lake, with grassy and wooded hills all about, and undulated "drift" ground, Scottish in character. In 20 years he has made a most beautiful garden of many acres. The house too is a beautiful one, overlooks the lake some 80ft below, and the descent is by a series of terraces with rows of clipped hedges and of Hemlock, Spruce and other plants, down to water [space in text]*8 with V [sic - space in text]*8 and paths bordered with mixed beds of flowers and shrubs, all kept as beautifully as the best English gardens, with infinitely more taste, care and variety than any English garden I know of. In deed[sic] nothing strikes me more forcibly than the variety, completeness and finish of the best class of gentleman's gardens here. All the best variegated shrubs and conifers of the English Nurseries are planted in profusion, not by twos and threes here and there, but in hundreds and in masses, and all varied by strikings and cuttings by their own gardeners. Of course there are not many such gardens as Mr Hunnewell's. On the opposite bank of the Lake is as magnificent a property

also of many hundred acres, given to the State by a Mr Durant for a School to educate female school teachers at about £50 a year for board and instruction. Mr D. has built on it a stupendous red brick College, which occupies a beautiful swelling mound of drift. This building holds 400 pupils, and is a really handsome pile. He has fitted it up with Class rooms for all literary teaching and laboratories for all Scientific researches and for all branches of physicical[sic] and biological researches; he has furnished it throughout and provided a Staff of Professors and a most beautiful Library, where I saw Bot[any] Magazine and at least 20 of my father's and my works. The whole cannot cost less than half a million sterling, and no one supposes it can ever be self-supporting. I send you a copy of the prospectus. Education is the rage here; wealthy people do not know what to do with their money. My Journal is more than I can manage, for besides all the above, I have already a mountain of Botanical notes and memos for Smith, Dyer*9, Oliver*10 &c. &c. Poor Strachey*11 has just got a telegraph from Lord Salisbury to say he must go to India [in] this cold weather, to settle some difficulty, but please say nothing of this. It mars his pleasure. We take train tomorrow to Newport, thence steamer to New York and straight on without stopping to Cincinnati where we spend Sunday, thence on to some place in Colorado, South of Colorado springs, which latter is a large town, the Capital of the State.

Please thank Willy for his kind letter and let him and all at Kew that care to, Bentham*12 included, see this letter. With love to all, Ever your affect[ionat]e husband, | J.D.Hooker.