HISTOEY OP BOTANICAL EXPLOEATION. 121 



and 271 species, including seventeen new genera, were founded on the drawings alone. 

 Shortly before his death, and somewhat unexpectedly and peremptorily, Mocino 

 requested that the drawings should be returned to him. How the whole of them 

 were copied, with the assistance of about a hundred ladies, in ten days, is a matter 

 of history. Since then, through the generous consideration of Mr. Alphonse DeCandolle, 

 the principal botanical establishments have acquired tracings of all the drawings on 

 which published species had been founded, except a few which had previously been 

 engraved for some of the < Memoires ' of A. P. DeCandolle. A copy in the Kew 

 Library has been of the greatest service in determining many doubtful species. , > 



In the Kew herbarium is a small collection of Mexican plants presented to the late 

 Sir William Hooker by a person named Tate, probably Mr. Tate, a nurseryman of 

 Sloane Street, London, who, early in the present century, was an enterprising cultivator 

 of Mexican plants obtained through various channels. It is probable that the dried 

 plants in question were received from Mocino ; we say probable, because they corre- 

 spond to plants described by DeCandolle from Mairet's herbarium, concerning which 

 we believe it is somewhere recorded, though we cannot recollect where, that Mairet 

 came into possession of some of Mocino's dried plants. The Kew specimens in question 

 are accompanied by labels bearing the same manuscript names cited by DeCandolle 

 from Mairet's herbarium, though not the same numbers. Senecio vernus, De C, is an 

 example, the manuscript name being Cineraria vernix, which was probably converted 

 into vernus by a slip of the pen, especially as the latter name has no particular appli- 

 cation to the plant, and the former has. 



Alexander Humboldt and Aime Bonpland. — The great scientific expedition led by 

 the master mind of his time is too well known to need much more than passing 

 reference here. It was entered upon in 1799 and terminated in 1804— the materials 

 amassed being sufficient to occupy a long and active life, to say nothing of the labours 

 of others. In several branches of inquiry we are still no further advanced than he 

 was, though his Mexican botanical collections were comparatively small, amounting, 

 according to Kotschy *, to 956 species belonging to 380 genera. These, as we learn 

 from the authors themselves f , were collected within a period of ten months, and in 

 parts of Mexico lying between the seventeenth and twenty-first parallels of latitude. 

 The routes and regions are, briefly :— 1. Western slopes of the Mexican Andes, from 

 the shores of the Pacific Ocean to Lake Tezcuco ; 2. Elevated Plains of Mexico, 

 temperate and frigid regions, from the valley of Mexico by Anahuac, El Baxio, and 

 Michoacan to the mines of Guadalajara; 3. Eastern slopes of the Mexican Andes, 

 from Perote to the Atlantic Ocean. A fuller explanation will be found in the work 



* " TJeberblick der Vegetation Mexicos" (Sitz. Ber. Akad. Wiss, Wien. viii. 1852). 

 t Nova Genera et Species Plantarum, vii. p. 433. 



biol. CENTE.-AMEK., Bot. Vol. IV., March 1887. r 



