24 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN BULLETIN 
Professor F. Lamson-Scribner, who has examined in detail 
the grasses of the Bernhardi herbarium, writes as follows: 
“This collection is especially valuable to American botanists, 
as it includes a large number of American species and has 
recently become even more interesting to the student of 
American plants, as it embraces very many species of our 
newly-acquired territory in the far east—the Philippine 
Islands.” The plants to which Professor Scribner refers 
are those cited in Presl’s Reliquie Haenkeane, and col- 
lected by Dr. Thaddeus Haenke on his voyages of explora- 
tion late in the eighteenth century, during which time he 
visited the Pacific Coast of North America and made col- 
lections of plants at various stations between Alaska and 
Chili, as well as in the Philippine Islands. The type, or 
original material, from which the descriptions of Presl’s 
species were drawn, are at the Botanical Museum in Prague, 
and duplicates were placed in the herbarium of the Uni- 
versity of Vienna and in the Royal Museum at Munich. A 
duplicate set also found its way to the Bernhardi herbarium. 
How complete this set may have been or how extensively 
the Haenke plants are represented in other groups than 
the grasses is impossible at present to say; but concern- 
ing this group Professor Scribner states further: “Of the 
334 species of grasses described by Presl, 121 are repre- 
sented in this collection. For all essential purposes these 
co-types, as they would now be designated, have practically 
the same usefulness for comparison and study as the actual 
type specimens in the Botanical Museum at Prague.” 
Among other noteworthy individual collections in the 
Bernhardi herbarium, and of almost equal interest to Ameri- 
can students, are a considerable number of Schiede and Deppe 
plants, collected in southern Mexico in about 1828 and re- 
ferred to by Hemsley in the Biologia Centrali-A mericana, the 
Martius and the Blanchet plants of Brazil, which are cited in 
Martius’ Flora Brasiliensis, thus rendering them of more 
than ordinary value. 
Soon after the Bernhardi herbarium was — a very 
substantial addition was made to the Garden collections by a 
most magnanimous gift from Dr. George Engelmann of his 
entire private herbarium, comprising nearly 100,000 plants 
which, to a large extent, were gathered from southern and 
western United States. These two herbaria have formed the 
basis from which the present Garden herbarium, through 
generous gifts, purchases, exchanges and collections made by 
members of the staff, has been developed to its present status, 
