16 SPECIES BLANCOANAE 
the part of European authors was based. They state also that 
on account of local climatic conditions, ravages of insects, etc., 
nobody had succeeded in preserving herbarium material, that 
is in building up a general herbarium, and that consequently 
their studies had to be based largely on fresh specimens; that 
on their own part they preserved specimens only of plants that 
were secured with difficulty and that were necessary for their 
investigations. The Novissima Appendix then resolved itself 
into a merely systematic list with synonyms, with the descrip- 
tions of thirty-three species, these either proposed as new or 
redescriptions of species of other authors, chiefly of Blanco. 
Except in those cases where these new species were based on 
specimens in Vidal’s herbarium, no material representing them 
is extant. Such herbarium material as was preserved by Fer- 
nandez-Villar and Naves, apparently representing but a very 
small percentage of the species they admitted as Philippine, was 
destroyed with the burning of the Guadalupe convent near 
Manila, February 19, 1899.1* 
In the Novissima Appendix all but about ten or twelve of 
Blanco’s and Llanos’s species were accounted for to the full satis- 
faction of the authors, these being reduced without question 
and without discussion to species of other authors. In a high 
percentage of cases the reductions were made to species that 
were originally described from extra-Philippine material, and _ ‘ 
which do not occur in the Philippines. The generic reductions 
for the most part are correct, but in some cases they are wrong. — 
The material on which the Novissima Appendix was based 
was not preserved, or such specimens as were preserved are 
no longer extant. The enumeration is trustworthy only in so 
far as it was based on references in botanical literature that 
were in turn based on actual Philippine specimens. 
The Novissima Appendix is an excellent example of typo- 
graphical work, and allowing for inaccuracies in the treatment 
of species it is excellent from a bibliographical standpoint. 
Beyond this nothing can be said in favor of the work, as it 
is utterly untrustworthy in synonymy, as to the reduction of | 4 
species proposed by Blanco and by Llanos, and gives an entirely _ 
erroneous impression of the status of the knowledge of the 
Philippine flora at the time in which it was written. A total 
of 4,479 species was admitted as Philippine, distributed into 
* Report U. S. War Dept. 1* (1899) 390. Merrill, E. D. Derenienks work 
in the Philippines. Philip. Bur. Agr. Bull. 4 (1908) 34. 
