PREFACE. v 
of Fulham) and his family; and the acquaintance ripened into 
great friendship; and on the death of Mr. Salisbury, in 1829, the 
son (Dr. W. J. Burchell) inherited part of his property, and with it 
some (I doubt if all) of his MSS. 
Knowing that Dr. Burchell had these MSS., I several times re- 
quested him to let me have some or all of them, or, at any rate, 
leave them to me at his death, as I was very desirous of carrying 
out at least a part of the desires of my kind and early friend. 
Dr. Burchell died in 1864; and his extensive zoological and bo- 
tanical collections, made in Africa and Brazil, were offered to the 
University of Oxford on certain conditions, and not accepted. The 
botanical collections were then given by his surviving sister to Sir 
William Hooker for the Kew Herbarium, and his zoological collec- 
tions, containing a very large series of insects, were presented to the 
University of Oxford. 
Hearing that Dr. Burchell’s collections had been thus distributed, 
I called on Miss Burchell to inquire what had become of Mr. Salis- 
burys MSS. She stated that she had them all safe, but that she 
intended to burn them the next day, as she was determined that 
they should not be in any way mixed up with her brother’s collec- 
tions. At my urgent request, she most kindly gave them to me, on 
my pledging myself that they should not be placed along with her 
brother’s collections. 
These documents consisted of :— 
1. A large quantity of descriptions of genera, all written in pen- 
cil and on one-sized paper (like the Solander MSS.), all illustrated by 
pencil drawings of the more important parts of the plants described 
in the MSS. 
2. A cabinet of seeds and fragments of plants, evidently the spe- 
cimens described in the MSS. 
9. A series of fragments of the * Genera Plantarum,' written in a 
most beautiful manner. Several parts of this MS. had been copied, 
with slight alterations, three or four times over. It was this over- 
care in the preparation that prevented any = of this work from 
appearing. 
4. Some separate papers on the structure of Conifere, and a 
monograph of the genus Crocus, and other similar works in a more 
or less complete state. 
