MAETIUS 8 FLORA BliA SILIENSIS. 3 



versity in respect of the specimens available for the monographists of the 

 " Flora Brasiliensis" may be well illustrated by the contrast between 

 the Aeanthaceoe and the Verbenaceae, both of them worked up in Ger- 

 many at about the same period, — the one with the assistance of almost 

 every one of the collections above named ; the other without any aid 

 from the English, French, or Russian herbaria, nor yet, it would appear, 

 from all the German ones. The difference in the use made of their ma- 

 terials by these two monographists is also^ great, but rather in an inverse 

 than a direct ratio of their copiousness. 



The present part has been wholly worked up, at Geneva, in the her- 

 barium andlibrary of De Candolle — the herbarium, one of the most ex- 

 tended and varied that exists, the botanical library, a very complete one 

 in itself, and peculiarly adapted for practical use by the habit regularly 

 adopted by the elder De Candolle, and continued by his son, of extract- 

 ing from every new work received, references to genera newly esta- 

 blished or modified, to be regularly entered into an alphabetical register 

 kept for the purpose, and to species or structural observations entered 

 on separate slips of paper, and duly distributed into the covers or cases 

 kept for the different natural orders. Th us any monographist is at once 

 directed to the whole literature relating to the order or genus he takes 

 in hand. With such resources, and considerable assistance from other 

 quarters, Alph. de Candolle was enabled to give a very complete mono- 

 graph of the Santalaceae and Myristicacese in the Prodomus, of which the 

 articles on these families in the Brazilian Flora may be considered as an 

 amplification in respect of the very few species indigenous to that coun- 

 try, — 2 species of Thesium, and 26 of Myristica. To these the editor has 

 added a digression on the use and cultivation of the nutmeg, and on the 

 history — no very edifying one — of the almost abortive attempts hitherto 

 made to introduce it into Brazil. The great bulk, however, of the part con- 

 sists of the Apocynaceae byDr.T.Miiller of Argovie, curator of the Candol- 

 lean herbarium. This order, monographised for theProdromus, in 1844, by 

 Alph. De Candolle, is here worked up afresh, as far as regards the South 

 American, and especially the Brazilian, species, after a comparison of the 

 types of the Prodromus with the materials accumulated in the Candollean 

 herbarium, or borrowed from Munich, Petersburgh, Berlin, Vienna, and 

 Paris, but without any aid from British collections, beyond a good du- 

 plicate set of Spruce's plants, in Martius's herbarium, and a tolerably fair 

 one of Gardner's, in the Vienna Museum. The result is a detailed and 

 apparently accurate description of 274 species, distributed into 32 genera, 

 and illustrated by 53 plates. These plates are well engraved, and ac- 

 companied by ample dissections, sufficiently magnified to express clearly 

 what they are intended to show, without that exaggeration of size which 

 renders the plates in some of our modern works or memoirs almost un- 

 intelligible to unaccustomed eyes. The synonymy and stations are de- 

 tailed after the general plan of the work; and, for some peculiarities in 

 terminology — such as the substitution of " rostellum" for " radicula" — 

 it is probable that here, as in other instances, the editor, not the author, 

 is responsible. 



