Nov. 1902. Flora of the Island ok St. Croix — Millspaugh. 449 



1780. Ryan, John, M.D., was a plantation owner during the sec- 

 ond half of the eighteenth century, on Montserrat, and a friend 

 of von Rohr. He collected on St. Croix and St. John and had 

 his brother collect for him on Trinidad. On his return he turned 

 over all his excellently cured specimens, together with flowers 

 and fruits preserved in alcohol and his notes pertaining to the 

 collection, to Prof. Vahl of Copenhagen. He died in the begin- 

 ning of the nineteenth century. 

 Coll.: Bot. Museum, Copenhagen. 

 Lit.: Vahl Eel. Praef. ; Kiaersk. in Bot. Tidsskr. Kopenh. XXHl 



(1900), p. 44. 



1786-87. Richard, Louis Claude Marie (1754- 1821), born at 

 Auteuil (France), September 4, 1754, oldest son of Court Gar- 

 dener Claude R. , and nephew of the keeper of the gardens at 

 Trianon, left the paternal home because he refused to take eccle- 

 siastic orders in obedience to his father's wishes, entered the Col- 

 lege Mazarin, Paris, studied mineralogy, zoology, comparative 

 anatomy and especially, under Bernhard de Jussieu, botany, and 

 besides earned more than his living draughting garden plans. In 

 1781 he was sent by King Louis XVI, at the instigation of the 

 Academy of Sciences, to Guayana to extend the range of econo- 

 mic plants on the French Antilles and to introduce the same into 

 the Old World. In 1785 he made a journey to Brazil (Para), 

 and then from February, 1786. until November, 1787, he visited 

 the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Antigua, Barbados, 

 Anguilo, St. Croix, Tortola, St. Thomas, St. John, Porto Rico 

 and Haiti, and then went back to Guayana, returning to France 

 with his rich treasures from the animal, plant and mineral king- 

 doms and many valuable sketches, in the spring of 1789. In the 

 meantime there had been a political change in France, and he 

 found not only the sovereignty but also the Museum in the hands 

 of men who did not wish to know anything about his mission, and 

 furthermore declined to reimburse him the expenses of the expe- 

 dition, which he had borne out of his own means. This unjust 

 treatment destroyed his desire to publish his many discoveries, 

 and he was compelled to resume landscape architecture as a 

 means of earning his livelihood. Finally, in 1795, when Four- 

 croy had founded the School of Medicine, he received the pro- 

 fessorate of botany in the same, established a small botanical 

 garden and educated a number of real scholars. His publications 

 were not numerous, and though they were most excellent, they 

 were n\)t at all comparable, according to the testimony of his con- 

 temporaries, with the discoveries that he actually made in the 

 realm of botany and zoology. He died in Paris after a prolonged 

 illness, June 7, 1821. 



Coll. : His excellent herbarium went into the possession of his 

 son, Achille Richard, who elaborated the phanerogams in Sagra's 

 Historia de Cuba. After the death of the latter the collections of 

 both father and son, of which the Herb. Guyanense- Antillanum 



