MR. s. Or. baker's st3tem\ irid.vcearum:. 61 



Systema Iridacearum. By J. (r. Baker, Esq., F.L.S. 



[Read December 7, 1870.] 



On"K of our gi^eatest wants at the present time in evcry-day her- 

 barium-work is a key to the genera of Iridacese, and a means of 

 ready access to the great mass of scattered Iridaceous figures and 

 literature. AVe now know in the order about seven hundred 

 species and between sixty and seventy well-marked genera. 

 Nearlj' all the Iridaceae inhabit temperate regions, and may be 



grown 



The order 



includes seA^eral of our most familiar garden genera, as, for in- 

 stance, Gladiolus, Crocus, and Iris. How it comes that such an 

 order has been so much neglected by systematists, I have never 

 been able to understand. It was one of the few orders of Mono- 

 cotyledons that were not treated in Kunth's ' Ehumeratio ;' and 

 leavincr out of count Dr. Klatt's papers, which are scattered 

 throut>-h several volum'es of the ' Linnaea,' for the latest continuous 

 synopsis of the order we must go back to Dietrich's ' Synopsis 

 Plantarum,' published in 1839, and this a mere compilation from 



other books. 



During the first thirty, or perhaps we may fairly say forty, 



years of the century the order was energetically studied in this 

 country. The principal worker in the field was Gawler, who 

 afterwards changed his name to Bellenden Ker, left England a 

 generation ago, and died at Nice within the last few years. He 

 published, in 1805, in the first volume of Konig and Simjj's 'Annals 

 of Botany,' a paper containing a complete synopsis of genera, with 

 a list of all the species then known. In this paper many of the 

 genera as now admitted were for the first time named and 

 fully characterized. For many-jears, during the editorship of 

 Dr. Sims, he contributed largely to the ' Botanical Magazine,' and 

 during that time gave figures and descriptions of a large propor- 

 tion of the Irids then in cultivation, a number many times greater 

 than we possess at the present day. In 1827 he published sepa- 

 rately at Brussels a paper entitled ' Genera Iridearum,' in which 

 he gives a synonymic list of all the species then known, and a 

 full description of the thirty genera under which he classifies 



^ 



them. ..J 



What I am aiming at in t^e present paper is to do for 187G 



what Ker did for 1827. We now know nearly 700 species, against 



LITW 



BOTANY, VOL. XVI. <^ 



