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Document number: 07948
Date: 08 Sep 1859
Recipient: HOOKER William Jackson
Author: TALBOT William Henry Fox
Collection: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Collection number: EL 40.321
Last updated: 13th July 2010

Lacock Abbey
Chippenham
Sept 8 / 59

Dr Sir

I beg to send you a photoglyphic engraving <1> executed on a steel plate of a little fern growing in my hothouse – It is very common, but I know not its name, except that it is some Adiantum.

I send it however as an exemplification of the process, in its application to botany – Of course 3 or 4 thousand impressions can be taken from the plate<.>

Believe me Yours ever truly
H. F. Talbot

Sir W. J. Hooker

[on accompanying sheet: depiction of fern]

Notes:

1. Around this time, WHFT published a photoglyphic engraving based on a photograph by Charles Piazzi Smyth: as "Young Dragon trees, near Orotava, Teneriffe," Transactions of the Botanical Society (Edinburgh), March 1859, pl. 6. WHFT was later to publish a "Photoglyphic Engraving of a Fern" in the same journal, v. 7, June 1863, pl. 14, p. 559.