BEE e KEN, 
BOTANICAL INFORMATION. 103 
of this neighbourhood. I am quite convinced that a diligent 
collector would meet with new species, for many successive 
years, though he should limit his researches to the environs 
of Paramaribo. All the plants collected by my friend, M. 
Weigel, a number of which, I believe, were published by 
Reichenbach, (the far greater portion being sold to N. Ame- 
rica, after he had fallen a victim to his profession,) had been 
gathered near this place and town. It must also be observed 
that M. Weigel limited his attention to a few large natural 
families, Filices, Graminee, Solanee, and the smaller herba- 
ceous plants, to the exclusion of those, which even I, though 
no botanist, can readily perceive to form the characteristic 
growth, the very type of the Surinam Flora. 
When M. Splitgerber,* a botanist of note from Holland, 
spent a short time in this colony, I presented him with a 
considerable number of plants, which I had gathered and 
dried, according to my own process, ten years previously. 
He said, to use his own words, “I should be sorry to be 
doomed to prepare specimens in this way ;" and certainly all 
those which he had himself collected, fell to pieces and turned 
perfectly black. 
There may be, and certainly there are, disadvantages in the 
fact of my not being a good. botanist; and these extend to 
others, as well as, more deeply to myself. But some counter- 
balancing recommendations still exist. I shall not travel 
through the country, as many naturalists have elsewhere done, 
even on horseback, pursuing only the known track and ga- 
thering what is most striking. Nor will the partiality influ- 
ence me, which sways the experienced botanist, and which too 
often induces him to overlook certain tribes altogether, and to 
limit his attention to particular groups of plants for which 
he feels a preference; thus causing the absence of those links 
in the chain of natural alliances, which occasions such gaps 
in science. How can the traveller, who comes a stranger to 
the land which he is to explore, and is limited with respect to 
* This gentleman has recently paid a visit to this country, sei is known 
to the scientific world by his description of the ferns of Surina 
