AD EL BERT VON CH AMIS SO AS A NATURALIST. 257 



to be largely absorbed in details. It must first be recollected 

 that lie regarded himself as a systematic botanist. Shortly after 

 his return to Berlin he received a position as assistant in the 

 Botanical Institute at first in the Botanical Garden, and after- 

 ward in the Herbarium and filled that office till his death. He 

 also, at the suggestion of Minister von Altenstein, composed a 

 little botanical text-book for the use of schools, in the introduc- 

 tion to which he laid down his general views on organization and 

 systematics. A memorial of his botanical work was published 

 shortly after his death by his friend and former colleague von 

 Schlechtendahl, in Linnsea, in which, under the running title De 

 plantis in expeditions Romanzofiana observatis (On the Plants ob- 

 served in the Romanzoff Expedition), several of Chamisso's plants 

 were familiarly described. A modest plant of the family of the 

 unwilting amaranths (Chamissoa, Kunth) preserves his name in 

 systematic botany. His favorite plants were those of the water, 

 particularly the Potamogetai. 



Chamisso's discoveries on the voyage began when he descried, 

 even on the English coast at Plymouth, a species (Centaur ea ni- 

 grescens) which had escaped the local botanists. In several places, 

 as at Teneriffe and in Brazil, he was pre vented from making im- 

 portant collections by the rainy season, and in Chili by the burn- 

 ing summer heat ; but he obtained nearly the whole of the flora of 

 the Radak chain, and the coast of California, which had been rarely 

 visited by botanists, afforded much that was new ; among others, 

 the papaver called after his fellow-voyager Esclisclwltzia calif or- 

 nica, the seeds of which he brought home with him, and the brill- 

 iant flowers of which still adorn our gardens. The islands of the 

 Arctic Ocean, between America and Asia, furnished a rich spoil 

 in their Alpine flora, which strongly reminded him of the Alpine 

 meadows of Switzerland. So sharp and skilled had his vision 

 become, which he had begun to train to the observation of natu- 

 ral objects three years before his journey, that, botanizing on Ta- 

 ble Mountain at the Cape of Good Hope with Mundt, of Berlin, 

 who was sojourning there, he found, as at Plymouth, several 

 plants that had until then escaped notice. 



Schlechtendahl can not sufficiently praise the magnanimous un- 

 selfishness with which Chamisso, after his return home, surren- 

 dered his specimens to be examined by other botanists who seemed 

 better fitted by their studies to that work. Thus, he sent to the 

 Swedish algologue, Agardh, a collection of alge, among which 

 was a rare double form found at the Cape, a living fucoid (F. con- 

 fervicola or Sphairococcus) on a conferva (C. mirabilis or hospiia). 

 Agardh, who was a little too earnest a transformist, and believed 

 that certain algse could become animals, imagined that in this 

 case the one form was changed into the other a view which, true 



VOL. XXXVIII. 18 



