Ixxviii PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



International Botanical Congress, which was held the next year 

 in London under the presidency of A. De Candolle ; but after de- 

 voting himself for some months to the duties of his office, he was 

 reluctantly obliged to tender his resignation, and again to leave 

 England to explore with his former fellow-traveller, Captain Bedford 

 Pirn, 'New Segovia and other parts of Nicaragua, for the Central 

 American Association. He left England in March 1866, and 

 returned in August with several new plants, which were considerably 

 increased in number during his second visit in the following year. 

 One result of these explorations was the purchase by some English 

 capitalists of the JaVali gold-mine, in the district of Chontales, 

 Nicaragua, and the company secured Dr. Seemann's services as 

 managing director. The result has been disastrous to science. For 

 the last three years of his life, the necessary long and frequent 

 absences from England and attention to business matters isolated 

 Dr. Seemann, and greatly interfered with his botanical work. Besides 

 the Javali mine. Dr. Seemann had the management of a large sugar- 

 estate near Panama. Still his friends, and he himself, hoped that 

 all this was but temporary, and that when the mine had got into 

 thoroughly good order, leisure and opportunity would be found for 

 his return to scientific research. 



Besides his scientific works Dr. Seemann was a prolific writer on 

 subjects of general literature and politics, and he was also the author 

 of several short dramas, two or three of which have some popularity 

 in Hanover, and of some pieces of music, of which art he possessed 

 a good knowledge. In botany the groups which more especially 

 engaged his attention were the genera Camellia and Thea, of which 

 he published a synopsis in vol. xxii. of our Transactions, and other 

 Ternstroemiacece ; the Crescentiacete, of which he published a mono- 

 graph in vol. xxiii of our Transactions ; the Hederacece, a revision of 

 which Order, reprinted from the ' Journal of Botany,' he pubhshed 

 as a separate work in 1868 ; and the Bignoniacece, with which he 

 intended to have pursued a similar plan. 



Besides the books already mentioned. Dr. Seemann was the author, 

 amongst others, of the descriptions in English and German to the 

 ' Paradisus Yindobonensis,' of an enumeration in German of the 

 Acacias cultivated in Europe, of a ' Popular History of Palms,' a 

 translation of which into German by Dr. BoUa has passed through 

 two editions in that language. His ' British Eerns at one View ' 

 (1860) has been a useful work to amateurs. Of detached papers in 

 science, the Royal Society's Catalogue (to 1863) enumerates fifty- 



