Jan. 1904.] B0T.\N1CAL SOCIETY OF EDINBUEGH 425 



PllELIMlXAUY EePORT OX THE BOTANY OF CAPTAIN 



Dowding's Colombian Expedition, 1898-99. By T. A. 

 Sprague, B.Sc. (Ediu.), E.L.S., Assistant in the Herbarium, 

 Eoyal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 



(liead 14th Jamiaiy 190i.) 



In the summer of 1898 I heard, through Professor 

 Bayley Balfour, that Captain (now Eear- Admiral) H. W. 

 Dowding, E.X., was contemplating an expedition to the 

 South of the Eepublic of Colombia, and that he desired to 

 be accompanied by a botanist, as part of the country to be 

 visited was botanically unexplored. On Professor Balfour's 

 advice, I made arrangements to join the expedition, and, after 

 a short time spent at Kew and the British Museum (Nat. 

 Hist.), gathering information on the vegetation and flora of 

 Colombia, left England in October 1898 in company with 

 Captain Dowding. 



Our route was briefly this : — up the Orinoco and its 

 tributary the Meta to the village of Cabuyaro, then by 

 mule across the llanos and the Cordilleras to Bogota, thence 

 via Jirardot along the Magdalena valley to Pitalito in the 

 South of the Department of Tolima, and Anally across the 

 Eastern Cordilleras to the village of Mocoa, the capital of 

 the Caqueta territory ; here we separated. Captain Dowding 

 returning to England in consequence of ill-health, rid Pasto, 

 Tumaco, and Panama, while I descended the rivers Putumayo, 

 Aguarico, and Napo to the Amazon, arriving in England in 

 December 1899. 



The task of determining my collection, in itself laborious 

 owing to the scattered state of the "literature" on Colombian 

 plants, and to the poverty in Colombian material of the 

 two great British Herbaria, has been undertaken in the 

 intervals between other official work, and has sometimes 

 been suspended for months together. Up to the present 

 date (December 1903), only the Polypetalce have been 

 completely worked out, and as the determination of the 

 collection will probably not be completed for some 

 considerable time, it has been decided, with the per- 

 mission of the Director of the Eoyal Botanic Gardens, 

 Kew, to publish at once the following diagnoses of new 



