MR. RICHARD SPRUCE’S HEPATICE ELLIOTTIANE. 301 
Hepatic® ELuiott1an”#, insulis Antillanis S% Vincentii et 
Dominica a clar. W. R. Elliott, aunis 1891-92, lcte, 
Ricarvo Spruce determinate. 
[Read 21st December, 1893.] 
(Puates XX.-XXX.) 
THE new species in the following list of the Hepaties collected 
by Mr. W. R. Elliott in the British West Indies during the 
years 1891 and 1892, on behalf of the Joint Committee of the 
Royal Society and the British Association for the Exploration 
of the Natural History of the West Indies, seem not to have 
been described before. In some of the finest and most con- 
spicuous species of his gathering he had been anticipated by 
Eggers, Wallis, and others, who had previously found them in 
other isles of the Antilles, or on the mainland of S. America, in 
Venezuela and New Granada. Good descriptions of them have 
been given by Herr Stephani in the pages of ‘ Hedwigia’ for 
the years 1888 and 1892. Those here described are most!y 
minute species and include no novel types, but are some of 
them interesting as adding new forms to groups of which only a 
few species were previously known. 
Since the publication of Swartz’s ‘ Flora Indie Occidentalis,’ 
vol. iii. (1806), where several West-Indian hepatics were 
described for the first time, and often very incompletely, with 
some confusion of allied forms under the same name, there has 
been no attempt at a complete hepatic flora of the whole group. 
The only island which has been systematically explored for 
hepatics is Porto Rico, where the Kunstgirtner C. Schwanecke 
gathered them during three years (1847-50); and his specimens, 
comprising 58 species, were published by Hampe and Gottsche in 
‘Linnea’ for 1853 (pp. 333-357). Nearly 40 years later (1885-7) 
Sinteuis added largely to this total, and Stephani’s enumeration 
of the entire hepatic flora amounts to 111 species (‘ Hedwigia,’ 
1888, pp. 276-302). In 1845 Montagne described the few 
Cuban hepatics known to him in Ramon de la Sagra’s ‘ Historia 
fisica. ...de la Isla de Cuba,’ vol. ix. 1845, and was able to 
give for the first time a figure of the perfect plant of the curious 
Cyathodium cavernarum. I also gathered this plant, but sterile, 
in a cave at the foot of the volcano Tunguragua in Ecuador, 
but inadvertently omitted it from my enumeration, ‘ Hepatic 
Amazonice et Andine,” in Trans. Bot. Soc. Edinb. xv. (1884). 
[At this point the MS. of Mr. Spruce’s preface abruptly enda, 
LINN. JOURN.—BOTANY, VOL. XxX. 24 
