THE MISSOURI BOTA SIC AL GARDEN. 215 



containing the types of his work on cacti, Agave, Cuscuta, Yucca, 

 conifers, and other groups of plants on which he was a recognized 

 authority, and in which he described many species, will long form the 

 most essential resource of students of these plants, for clearing up 

 difficulties in their interpretation. Some years since, one of the 

 young men at the garden was struck by the frequent coincidence of 

 a certain handwriting with species of grasses known to have been 

 collected by Haenke, and to have served for studies by Presl; and 

 investigation showed that the writing was really Presl 's, 'and that in 

 the Bernhardi herbarium, which contains many valuable but un- 

 fortunately inadequately labeled specimens, was a nearly full set 

 of this important collection of Haenke the grasses of which were 

 subsequently studied in detail by Professor Lamson-Scribner, to the 

 elucidation of a number of questions concerning the grasses of the 

 United States, which could be answered only by recourse to the original 

 specimens on which Presl 's species rested. 



It would be even more tiresome to give a minute analysis of the 

 contents of the herbarium than of the library. Suffice it to say that 

 in addition to the Engelmann and Bernhardi herbaria, it contains 

 the herbarium of Sturtevant purchased after his death from an old 

 friend to. whom he had given it, but who desired it to be placed with 

 the other material serving as a record of his friend's work; a pre- 

 Linnean collection formed by the German botanists, Ludwig and 

 Boehmer, on which a Prussian flora was based long since ; the 

 cryptogamic herbarium of the director of the garden; a very large and 

 full collection of the plants of Alaska, made on the Harriman Alaska 

 Expedition, and containing, through the Bernhardi herbarium, repre- 

 sentatives of a considerable number of the species collected by the 

 early Bussian explorers; a good representation of the plants of the 

 West Indies, collected by a former assistant at the institution, who 

 was sent into the Caribbean region on a collecting trip; one of the 

 fullest representations of plants from the Azores, in which, and to 

 a smaller extent in Madeira, the director has spent some time; a very 

 full representation of the flora of Missouri, in which the Biehl col- 

 lection and a set of specimens many years since put up by Professor 

 G. C. Broadhead, and on which his early notes on the plants of the 

 state rest, are of especial interest; and probably the fullest set of 

 Chinese plants that has yet come to this country. All the more 

 important current collections of the plants of North America, and 

 many of those from foreign lands, have been bought as they have 

 been offered for sale. Not long before his death, Dr. Chapman, long 

 the only authority on the flora of our southern states, asked the director 

 to visit him, in order that arrangements might be made for the ultimate 



