24 CATALOGUE OF WELWITSCU's AFRICAN PLANTS. 



manu's Study-set" {Journ. Bot. 1889, pp. 102-5) are sullicicnt to 

 show that much of interest may be gleaned from these depositions. 



Of the set of specimens thus obtained for the National Herbarium 

 it is impossible to speak too highly. Many good collectors are not 

 botanists ; certainly many botanists are very bad collectors : but 

 Welwitsch combined in himself the qualifications of each, to an 

 extent which is rare, if not unique. From his abundant and well- 

 selected material it was possible to carry out with the most satis- 

 factory results the arrangement that the British Museum series 

 should correspond as nearly as possible with the study set ; and the 

 former remains absolutely intact, while the latter has, we believe, 

 to some extent been distributed to various herbaria. London is 

 more readily accessible than Lisbon, and as the British Museum set 

 is the basis of the Catalogue now begun, it is practically the standard 

 collection of Welwitsch's plants. Judging from monographs in 

 which Welwitsch's collections are cited, the distributed sets are (as 

 was necessarily the case) very incomplete, while if the plants now 

 at Kew may be taken as a sample, the material sent out has been 

 but meagre. 



There is no need to enlarge on Mr. Hiern's numerous qualifica- 

 tions for the task he has undertaken. In former years he worked 

 assiduously at African botany ; tlie third volume (and the most recent, 

 although published twenty years since) of the Flora of Tropical 

 Africa was mainly from his pen. He is, as every one who has 

 seen his work knows, painstaking and logical to a fault, thorough and 

 accurate in all his researches, whether botanical or bibliographical. 

 In this latter particular this Catalogue will come as a shock to those 

 whose nomenclature is regulated by (supposed) "convenience," for 

 Mr. Hiern — a firm believer in that form of priority which recognizes 

 as the right name for a plant that under which it has been described 

 in the genus in which it is retained — has rigidly carried out his 

 principles, with, it must be allowed, somewhat startling results. 

 He has followed — sometimes at a safe distance — Dr. Otto Kuntze's 

 licvisio Generwn, and it must be confessed that the result is to con- 

 firm the opinion, already expressed in these pages, that the licvisio 

 contains excellent work which cannot be ignored by systematists. 

 Mr. Hiern, in adopting Dr. Kuntze's nomenclature, has carefully 

 tested it in every instance ; in some cases — for example, as the 

 adoption of names published prior to 1753, and in a certain 

 indifference to niceties of spelling — he (we think properly) declines 

 to follow him. Probably no systematist — certainly no Lnglish 

 systeraatist — has hitherto taken Dr. Kuntze so seriously and tested 

 his work so thoroughly ; and it will be interesting to see how the 

 bringing of this revolution to our own doors will be received by 

 English-speaking botanists. 



Even the most hardened followers of the laws of priority will 

 feel a pang of regret at the disappearance of Weltvitsckia in favour 

 of Welwitsch's earlier name Tuinhoa ; while Camoensia is in many 

 respects preferable to (iitj/nithemuni, which has six years' priority. 

 Maximilianea Mart. (1819) for Cochlospermuni Kunth (1822) ; 

 Calceolaria Loefling (17'58) for lonidium Vent. (1803) ; iiinorea 



