130 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



scanty and inaccessible. Yet I have never failed to pick up 

 any scraps of a biographical nature that have come in my 

 way, and have found them full of an absorbing interest. 



It can usually be taken for granted that the life of any 

 man who has attained any considerable degree of eminence 

 will be marked by some notable triumph over adverse or- diffi- 

 cult circumstances, and will therefore possess a certain dra- 

 matic (|ualitv. This is, of course, not a universal rule; some 

 great men seem to be born with the proverbial silver spoon 

 in the mouth, and to be wafted by favoring breezes along the 

 placid way of uninterrupted success; but such favorites of for- 

 tune have not been numerous in the history of botany, and 

 most of the great systematists have known what it was to con- 

 tend with adversity. 



A few facts came into my possession recenly that illus- 

 trate this in the case of one of those names that used to ap- 

 peal to my youthful imagination by reason of its exotic 

 strangeness. The unmistakeably Portuguese surname of 

 Loureiro always provoked my lively curiosity. Portugal has 

 never been prolific in men of science; and after her brief 

 period of exploration and colonization in the time of Magel- 

 lan (himself a Spaniard) has seemed to be withdrawn from 

 the great currents of scientific activity. The usual works of 

 reference contain no mention of Loureiro, and it is only re- 

 cently, through the kindness of Miss Mary A. Day, Librarian 

 of the Gray Herbarium, that I have been able to get hold of 

 the few facts that are known about his life. The best ac- 

 count of him is to be found in Don Miguel Colmeiros' La Bot- 

 aiiica y los Botanicos dc la Peninsula I lispano-Lusitaua 

 (1858), from whose sonorous Castilian periods 1 have been 

 able to extract the following information : 



Juan Loureiro was born in Lisbon in the year 1715. lie 

 was educated by the Jesuits, and at an early age joined that 

 order. They were then, as they have been always, a body of 

 missionaries; and the young Loureiro, at the age of twenty, 



