Domenico Maria Leone Cirillo is grateful for a letter from Linnaeus [this letter has not come down to us].
Cirillo discusses his botanical work. With the exception of Fabio Colonna, nobody has earlier annotated or described the plants of Naples more carefully than Cirillo. Pietro Antonio Micheli found many new plants but he described them imperfectly.
Cirillo found it very difficult to define species according to Linnaeus’s system, since he did not always have Linnaeus’s Species plantarumat hand. He has had great help from Linnaeus’s latest Systema naturae, 10th edition, but there are no synonyms except for the trivial names. From this Linnaeus can gather how much Cirillo desires a new edition of Species plantarum [The second edition was published the same year, Species plantarum].
Cirillo wonders whether Linnaeus places the Anthyllis, i.e., Johann Philip Breyne’s Barba jovis pumila villosa, among the varieties of Anthyllis, etc.
Cirillo has not yet read Linnaeus’s dissertation Generatio ambigena. Therefore, he cannot say whether his own findings confirm Linnaeus’s system.
Cirillo sends Linnaeus some seeds and exsiccated plants. He mentions a peculiar species of Galium that is not annotated in Linnaeus’s Systema naturae; it comes from the Appenines. There is also a Plantago foliis linearibus glabris, which Cirillo has never seen before. He wants to know whether it is a new species or whether it could be Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s Plantago gramineo folio minor in the latter’s Institutiones rei herbariae, etc.
Cirillo does not have the plants that Linnaeus desires. He has never seen a Papia garganica. Vallisneria can be had from the botanists in Florence. Cirillo will send it together with seeds of Drypis.
For the present Cirillo has not time to write down his observations on insects