hnxi;an society of londox. gx 



portion of the Herbarium has been investigated by experts, and 

 how large a portion remains only partially explored. 



The mere cataloguing of the sheets offers considerable difficulty : 

 it can only be accomplished by some person adequately equipped 

 with a knowledge of the handwTiting of the various persons who 

 contributed the plants to Carl von Linne ; a transcriber only 

 would be useless. 



Though the perfect catalogue is to be hoped for rather than 

 expected, the Liuuean Society has two catalogues which supply 

 some information, and the present paper is concerned with these. 

 In the Banksian collections, formerly at the British Museum, at 

 Bloomsbury, and now at Cromwell Eoad, South Kensington, there 

 exists a copy of Linne's ' Species Plantarum,' first edition, marked 

 by either Solander or Dryander (probably the latter) with a short 

 stroke under the running number of each species, showing what 

 species at some unstated date were represented in the Linnean 

 Herbarium (see Journ. Bot. xxxiv. (1896) pp. 359-362). These 

 references were copied by Mr. "W". Carruthers into a copy of the 

 ' Species Plantarum ' which he gave to the Eoyal Botanic Gardens, 

 Kew, in 1871, which copy also contains the suppressed pages 

 reprinted in facsimile by Herr von Piatt in the ' Botanisches 

 Centralblatt,' Bd. Ixvi. (1896) pp. 218-219. It was formerly 

 supposed that these marks M^ere inserted during the winter of 

 1784-5, when the Linnean Herbarium was compared with that 

 belonging to Sir Joseph Banks (Proc. Linn. Soc. 1887-88 (1890) 

 pp. 27-28), but this is probably an error, for amongst the Linnean 

 books, one of the two interleaved and annotated copies of the first 

 edition of the ' Species Plantarum ' is marked in the same manner; 

 it seems certain that from this Dryander copied his notes. 



Notwithstanding the interest attaching to this copy and its 

 secondary copies, another list exists of a somewhat later date, and 

 fuller in details. It consists of a small quarto volume, 20 cm. x 

 16 cm., without title or heading, in contemporary binding with 

 calf back and corners, and sides covered with sprinkled paper ; it 

 contains 39 leaves written on both sides in double column 

 (except the last page) of all the names of plants then known, with 

 a mark against such as were in the Herbarium. This mark was at 

 first an underscore as in the ' Species Plantarum,' but from the 

 sixth page onwards the mark consists of a dot placed before the 

 figure in front of each name, as shown in the specimen page 

 annexed (p. 95). A blank leaf was left between each written leaf, 

 but at some later period three of these blank leaves were roughly 



