Sl 



193 



HEINRICH GUSTAV REICHENBACH. 

 --. (182|-1889.) 



i 



Once more we have to regret the loss of a leader in our 

 science, whose place it will be difficult to fill. There are few, if 

 any, who have so thoroughly monopolised a special group of plants 

 as the late Professor Reicheubach. There were, indeed, botanists 

 in England and elsewhere who studied and named Orchids, and 

 whose knowledge of certain genera may have been equal or even 

 superior to that of the Hamburg Professor ; but none came within 

 appreciable distance of his grasp of the whole Order, or in the extent 

 and variety of the material at their disposal. His knowledge was 

 as unique as is the means by which he has succeeded in rendering 

 his material temporarily, if not permanently, useless to those who 

 should continue his work ; the value of his investigations of a 

 difficult tribe of plants will outlast the provisions by which he 

 has for the time deprived his successors of the full benefit which 

 might have been derived from them. 



Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach was born at Leipzig on Jan. 8rd, 

 182$. He was the son of H. G. L. Reichenbach, author of the 

 classical ' Icones Florae Germanic®' and other important works, who 

 died in 1879 at the advanced age of eighty-six. It w^is in con- 

 nection with the above-named work that the younger Reichenbach 

 first displayed his botanical knowledge and critical acumen. The 

 volume devoted to the Orchids, which appeared in 1851, was entirely 

 from his pen, and was, as he tells us in the preface, the result of 

 ten years' work ; for this and the succeeding volumes he also 

 prepared the drawings. From this time he devoted himself, not 

 exclusively, indeed, but for the greater part of his life, to the 

 Orchidace(B. From 18G5 until within two days of his death, his 

 contributions towards the knowledge of this Order appeared almost 

 weekly in the ' Gardeners' Chronicle,' in which paper for May 18th 

 is a portrait and memoir. Sixty-nine papers stand under his 

 name in the Royal Society's * Catalogue of Scientific Papers,' 

 extending to 1873 ; and he monographed the Order for Seemann's 

 * Flora Vitiensis ' and * Botany of the ' Herald.' ' In 1854 Reichen- 

 bach began ' Xenia Orchidacea,' w^hich has since appeared in 

 fascicles at uncertain intervals ; and he described the OrchidacecB in 

 Mr. Saunders's ' Refugium Botanicum ' (1869-72). He also con- 

 tributed the scientific descriptions to the magnificent serial publi- 

 cation named in his honour, ' Reichenbachia,' which began in 1816, 

 and is still in progress. His principal work, however, and the 

 nearest approach to anything like a resume of the whole Order, is to 

 be found m the sixth volume of Walpers' ' Annales' (1861), nearly 

 800 pages of which are devoted to the bringing together of the 

 species described in periodicals and elsewhere during 1851-5, with 

 the addition of many novelties hitherto undescribed. 



His literary undertakings, although, as we have seen, by no 

 means inconsiderable, formed, however, but a part of Reichen- 

 bach's life-work. His official duties as Professor and Director of 



Journal of Botany. — Vol. 27. [July, 1889.] o 



