66 MARTIUS'S ELOGE ON LEDEBOUR. 
however, without personal danger, that he reached the place of his des- - 
tination, as Prussia was preparing for a bloody contest; and he was 
therefore compelled, in order to avoid the hostile armies, to brave a - 
stormy sea in an open fishing boat, from Danzig to Königsberg. 
At Dorpat our colleague began his multifarious and eventful activity | 
as teacher, observer, and author. He made the phytography of Russia 
the scientific problem of his existence; and with such successful energy, | 
. that the literary history of our times must always consider him as the 
` great leader in the flora of that empire. Through him and his colleague - 
in the Imperial Garden at St. Petersburg, the Councillor of State von 
Fischer, the botanists of the West owe their chief acquaintance with the 
botany of those eastern regions ; by his intense and critical zeal the Dor- 
pat garden became the depository for their widely scattered plants ; and | 
from thence, as well as the garden at St. Petersburg, the novel forms of : 
the Caucasian and Siberian vegetation were distributed among similar : 
institutions in other parts of Europe, in order to be more closely ex- - 
amined. 
In 1826 Ledebour made a scientific voyage to the Altai; and a. 
journey in winter, of five weeks’ duration, brought him to the distant 
Barnaul, the chief town in the great district of Siberian foundries, where - 
the widely-spread treasures of native gold attract vast numbers of ad- 
venturers, as do those of California and Australia. On the approach of 
spring he extended his researches from thence into the mountains, as far - 
as the Chinese frontiers, while his zealous pupil, the Councillor of State 
and Academician, Charles Anton Meyer, examined the Kirgisian wilds 
west of Altai, and von Bunge, now his successor in the chair of Dor- 
. pat, visited its eastern parts. The harvest derived from these ex 
~ tions, and the iconographical and descriptive works which Lede 
published, partly at the charge of the Imperial Russian Governm 
. form an epoch in the descriptive systematic and geographical botany 
. the Russian Flora, for which the two Gmelinst, Messerschmied, Mar- 
-schall von Bieberstein, Fischer, and others, as well as many among the 
* Icones Plantarum novarum vel imperfecte cognitarum, Floram Rossicam im 
primis Altaicam illustrantes; 5 vols, fol., Riga, 1829-34, Next, Flora Altaica; 
.. 4 vols, 8vo, Berlin, 1829-83; and finally, Flora Rossica, sive Enumeratio Plan 
— tarum in totius imperii Rossici provinciis F i dicho bend, i 
que observatarum, Stuttgard, 1842-51, Weit; Ahaha of Aripi M 
+ Ledebour has added a copious commentary to J. G. Gmelin’s ‘Flora Sibirica, 
in memoirs of the Royal Botanie Society of Ratisbon, vol. iii., 1841, pp. 48-188. 
