HISTOEY OF BOTANICAL EXPLOEATION. 133 



company with him, for the numbers are often, if not always, the same in the two collec- 

 tions. It may also be mentioned here that Hugh Cuming, the well-known and extensive 

 collector of objects of natural history, collected in Taboga I. and in the Pearl Islands, 

 Panama, and Montijo Bay, Chiriqui river, about 1829, and there is a set of his plants 

 in the Kew Herbarium ; but it is impossible to distinguish in many cases which were 

 collected within our limits, because they are labelled " Panama et Colombia occiden- 

 tals " *. Placide Duchassaing de Fontbressin, bora at Guadalupe in the West Indies f , 

 collected at Panama about 1850, and the novelties were described by Walpers and 

 Grisebach J, but we have seen none of his plants. Thomas Briggs, a son-in-law of 

 Hugh Cuming, visited Veraguas and Costa Rica in 1856, and there are a few plants in 

 the Kew Herbarium collected by him in the former country. Dr. J. F. Billberg 

 collected at Portobello in 1826 ; and P. J. Beurling published an Enumeration of the 

 plants §. Many are described as new ; but those investigated (the MelastomaceEe, for 

 example, by Dr. J. Triana) prove to belong, almost all of them, to previously described 

 species. 



Mateo Botteri.—K Dalmatian by birth, who was originally sent to Mexico by the 

 Horticultural Society of London || about the year 1850 ; but the Society's resources 

 failing, he collected on his own account and disposed of his collections through Stevens 

 in London. His collections of plants were very fine and extensive, and there is a full 

 set in the Kew Herbarium, chiefly from the neighbourhood of Orizaba, where he soon 

 settled, and where he died a year or two ago. A small collection of Mexican plants 

 from Professor Sumichrast, of Tehuantepec, presented to Kew by Mr. A. DeCandolle in 

 1877, bear the same numbers for the same species as Botteri's. 



Auguste Fendler began his career as a collector in New Mexico in 1846, and 

 subsequently collected in Venezuela, Panama, Nicaragua, and Trinidad, where he died 

 in 1883% His Panama collection is dated 1850, and there is a good set at Kew. The 

 Niearaguan collection was a small one, made near Grey town ; it is mentioned some- 

 where in the writings of the late Professor Grisebach, but we do not remember where. 

 Fendler was an excellent collector. In the Kew Herbarium is a small number of 

 plants labelled " Panama, Dr. Halsted, 1850." There was, as we have been informed 

 by Dr. Asa Gray, a Dr. Halsted who was a surgeon in the United States Army, and 

 who botanized a little in North Mexico, though Dr. Gray doubted his having been in 



* Journal of Botany, 1865, p. 325. 



f Bulletin de la Societe Botanique de France, xx. p. 275. 



t Flora, 1853, p. 226, and Bonplandia, 1858, p. 2. 



§ Kongl. Yetenskaps-Akademiens Handlingar, 1854, pp. 107-148. 



|| Bonplandia, 1857, p. 72. 



% The Gardeners' Chronicle, n. s. xxii. p. 91. 



