5° 



PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



of Botany ' in 1851, pp. 49-57 and 351-361, and tlie last was 

 published conjointly with C. H. Wright, of the Kew Herbarium, 

 on the Muscineae of Mt. Kinabalu in North Borneo, in our 

 ' Transactions,' ser. 2, Bot. iv. (1894) pp. 255-261. His numerous 

 contributions to our Journal began in 1859, and his most compre- 

 hensive work, the ' Musci Americani,' containing Latin descriptions of 

 1745 species, including many new ones, which took up the whole of 

 the twelfth volume, was published in 1869. The work of Mitten in 

 Bryology may be compared to that of De Candolle on Phanerogams, 

 since he was the first to arrange them in strictly natural groups. 

 Up to the date of the publication of Mitten's paper on the " Musci 

 Indise Orientalis" in 1858, mosses were classified principally 

 according to the character of their spore-cases, although C. Miiller, 

 in his ' Synopsis Muscorum,' had already, in 1849, utilised the 

 leaf-structure in the characters of tribes and genera. In this 

 paper (Jom-n. Linn. Soc, Bot. iii. (1859) Suppl. pp. 1-6) Mitten 

 pointed out the greater importance of the structure of the leaf for 

 purposes of classification and relegated to the second place the 

 characters derived from the peristome. This new method of 

 classificatio]! was followed by Dr. Braithwaite in his classical 

 ' British Moss Flora,' and in the ' Popular Science B,eview,' 1871, 

 p. 374, he remarks concerning it : " Believing these views to be 

 strictly in accordance with facts derived from careful study of the 

 plants themselves and therefore true to nature, I feel bound to 

 adopt them, though I have ventured to deviate a little from the 

 arrangement, believing that the retention of the acrocarpous and 

 pleurocarpous system is certainly convenient." It has also been 

 adopted by Dixon and Jameson in their popular ' Handbook of 

 British Mosses,' with slight alterations, which are convenient, 

 rather than in accordance with the principle outlined by Mitten. 

 The extraordinary amount of work accomplished by Mitten during 

 a long series of yeai's, without neglecting his work in the pharmacy, 

 must have puzzled many of his correspondents. Those. to whom 

 he was personally unknown probably regarded him as a bad 

 correspondent, for he never wasted a moment in unnecessary 

 replies to enquiries made by those who wished to save themselves 

 the trouble of examining specimens, as so many dabblers in botany 

 do ; but anyone who sent a specimen, probably new, or showing 

 that time and trouble had been expended on it by the sender, 

 received a prompt and courteous reply. By thus limiting his 

 cori'espondence, and utilising all spare moments for work with his 

 microscope, he was able to do an astonishing amount of literary 

 and scientific work and to spare a little time for horticultural 

 experiments. During his later years he was much assisted by his 

 daughter Flora, who qualified herself, by passing the Examination 

 of the Pharmaceutical Society, to carry on the work of the 

 pharmacy. One of his greatest pleasures was to sift the mosses 

 sent from foreign countries for chance seeds to try and grow them. 

 He thus obtained several plants from remote islands visited by 

 the ' Challenger ' Expedition. His few hybridising experiments 



