BOTANICAL INFORMATION, 183 
It is likely to obtain soon a very considerable addition in Lagasca’s her- 
barium, which the Government intends purchasing. One portion of 
this latter, consisting of some hundreds of packets, is in the natural- 
history building; the other, in about twenty cases, lies at the Custom- 
house in Malaga, where both have continued many years, because 
Lagasca’s heirs, who are uneducated people, caring nothing about botany, 
have declined to defray the expenses of warehousing the collections. La- 
gasca, it appears, had left the cases at the Custom-house in Malaga, 
on his return from England, not being able, probably, to pay the 
charges for duty, &c, It is to be feared that the contents are in a 
very bad condition. Piolongo, who has seen the cases, states, that they 
are kept in a wet vault, that the bottom parts are quite decayed, and 
mice have attacked them. The packets at the Natural History Museum 
at Madrid, where they were deposited on the death of Lagasca, to save 
them from destruction, are now offered for sale by his creditors and 
heirs; but the good specimens cannot be very numerous, as it is re- - 
ported, that the worms have caused much mischief among them. It is 
probable that the noble collections of the late Don Mutis, of Santa Fé de 
Bogota, are in an equally deplorable state of decay. They are kept in 
a separate room of the botanical museum, inscribed “ Direccion del 
Museo botanico de la Nueva Granada.” Only a small part of the 
collections, made in New Granada by Mutis and others, has been un- 
packed; the rest, about sixty cases, has remained unopened these 
fifty years. The small portion which was unpacked by Rodriguez, and 
has been loosely arranged according to their genera, is so much in- 
jured from insects, as to be scarcely distinguishable, Cyperaceæ and ——— 
Gramineæ only excepted. What must not be the havoc among the — 
unopened cases ! These immense collections came to Madrid before — 
the war with Napoleon had commenced, and were to have been pub- _ 
lished at the expense of Government, together with the fine drawings, - 
made partly by Mutis himself, and partly by experienced artists, under 
his own direction. The professors at the garden were charged with 
putting the entire herbarium into proper order ; and for this purpose a 
very large and superior kind of paper was expressly manufactured at 
the public cost, which is still kept, in large quantities, in an adjoining 
closet. In short, everything was prepared for producing a noble her- 
barium and flora of New Granada, when the disastrous war broke out, 
succeeded by years of distress and tyranny, and at length by a civil 
