APPENDIX. 



NOTICES OF BOOKS. 



Catalogue of the African Plants collected by Dr. Friedrich Welwitsch 

 in i8sj-6i. Dicotyledons, part i. By William Philip Hiern, 

 M.A., F.L.S. London : Printed by order of the Trustees of the 

 British Museum, 1896. 



The late Dr. Welwitsch was not only an accomplished bocanist, he 

 was a most discriminating and painstaking collector, and his collection 

 of some 5000 species of Angola plants was a monument of skill and 

 industry. It was a model of neatness and order, and most of the species 

 were represented by a numerous series of specimens, accompanied by 

 copious descriptive notes and observations made on the spot. The 

 preparation of this herbarium occupied him upwards of seven years, 

 and was accomplished under great difficulties and privations, to say 

 nothing of severe attacks of fever and other diseases which few travellers 

 in tropical Africa escape. He travelled in the service of the Portuguese 

 Government, and in 1863 was permitted to come to England to work 

 out his collections. The remainder of his life was devoted to this pur- 

 pose ; yet he published comparatively little ; partly in consequence of 

 the extremely critical nature of his work, and partly in consequence of 

 almost continuous bad health. He died in 1873, and after some litiga- 

 tion with the Portuguese Government, his executors secured a very full 

 set of his plants and a transcript of all his notes for the British Museum. 

 Soon after Dr. Welwitsch settled in London Professor D. Oliver's Flora 

 of Tropical Africa, was commenced, and Welwitsch generously allowed 

 the use and incorporation of his plants — almost the only ones known 

 from Lower Guinea. This was continued, though imperfectly, through 

 volumes i. and ii., and then interrupted. 



Mr. Hiern's Catalogue is the first part of a work intended to embody 

 Welwitsch's notes and descriptions, and his own descriptions of any 

 unpublished species he may find in the course of his investigations. 

 The part issued includes the orders Ranunculaceae to the Rhizophoracete. 

 It is preceded by a portrait and biographical sketch of Welwitsch, and a 

 bibliography of his published writings and of other writers' publications, 

 exclusively or chiefly devoted to definite parts of Welwitsch's collections. 

 That Mr. Hiern has done his work very thoroughly is no more than 

 would be expected from his previous performances ; but there appears 

 to be no mention of the language in which the notes and descriptions 

 were originally written. This was Latin, and it is a question whether 

 it would not have been better to have published them in the original, 

 seeing that the collections were distributed among the herbaria ot various 

 countries. However, it is a great thing to have this treasury of informa- 



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