24 SPECIES BLANCOANAE 
sidered interesting, but some persons who heard of my work urged me to 
publish it. This I have done after correcting many errors which were 
due to haste and want of attention when it was written. I have enlarged 
it as much as the circumstances in which I was placed permitted me, and, 
although still containing mistakes and being far from perfect, it will at 
least serve to give a limited knowledge of the great botanical wealth of this 
fertile and pleasant country, and at the same time stimulate others to 
proceed with the work. 
Considering the circumstances under which it was written, 
Blanco’s Flora de Filipinas even if it is a curious work is also 
a remarkable book in some respects. Few botanists in any 
country or in any time have labored under greater disadvan- 
tages, and Blanco must be credited with initiative, industry, 
and perseverance. Most of the facts recorded are the result 
of his own observation, and even if he did make numerous 
grave errors in interpretation of species, his descriptions, as 
such, on the whole compare favorably with those of his con- 
temporaries. In fact his descriptions in general, on account 
of their length, are distinctly superior to the very brief diag- 
noses appearing in the older botanical literature as a means 
of interpreting the species intended. The fact should not be 
overlooked that species proposed by the early European authors, 
frequently very imperfectly characterized, are more often inter- 
preted by an examination of the actual type specimens preserved 
in various public and private herbaria, than by the descriptions 
themselves; in fact a very high percentage of all species de- 
scribed are more or less unintelligible without access to the 
actual specimens, or duplicates of them, on which they were — : 
based. Unfortunately Blanco preserved no herbarium material, 
and accordingly his species must be interpreted solely by the 
published data. 
THE WORK OF LOCAL INVESTIGATORS ON BLANCO’S 
FLORA DE FILIPINAS 
In addition to Walpers’s attempt to make Blanco’s descriptions 
of new species more generally available by translating them 
into Latin, and Hasskarl’s abortive attempt to interpret the 
species described, the interpretation of Blanco’s species has been 
the subject of special work by Llanos, Fernandez-Villar and 
Naves, and myself. In addition to these special works, none 
of them satisfactory, species described by Blanco in various 
families have been generally considered, often with little suc- 
cess, by authors of various monographs of families, tribes, and 
genera in the past eighty years. : ing 
