802 THE OWALA SEED AND OIL. 
to Mattioli, whose vague expressions regarding them only show that he 
did not fully appreciate the value of a herbarium. By a letter however 
from Maranta to Mattioli, it is evident that Ghini sent several plants 
that were glued on paper and labelled to Mattioli. Maranta writes :— 
* Scito, plantas omnes, quas ad te Pisis Lucas Ghinus anno abhine 
nono misit, mihi prius ab eo fuisse ostensas, inscriptionesque, quas 
singulis plantis apposuerat, non solum vidisse me, sed etiam deserip- 
si This collection seems to have been sent soon after the first 
edition of Mattioli’s Italian Commentary on Dioscorides (1548) was 
published. If Ghini at this time understood how to spread out and dry 
plants and so communicate specimens to his contemporaries, I am 
justified in believing that he, who died in 1556, probably an old man, 
had long been in the habit of doing this. And when we find that soon 
afterwards, his two pupils Cæsalpinus and Aldrovandus possessed 
herbaria or made them for others, it seems clear they learnt this from their 
master, and that Falconer, whose herbarium existed between 1540 and 
1547, was taught likewise at Pisa, or perhaps at Bologna, by Ghini. I 
am therefore inclined to consider, from all the information before me, 
that Luca Ghini was the inventor of herbaria. That they were in use 
much earlier is improbable, from the great interest excited by the few 
that then existed, from the admiration with which Amatus speaks of 
Falconer's, and from the want of a distinguishing name for the novel 
invention. 
THE OWALA OR OPOCHALA (PENTACLETHRA MACRO- 
PHYLLA, Benth.) OF THE GABOON AND FERNANDO 
PO, AND THE OIL CONTAINED IN ITS SEED. 
Bv J. ARNAUDON. 
Among the products sent by the French Colonies to the Universal 
Exhibition at Paris, in 1855, was the Owala seed, exhibited as coming 
from the Gaboon (Western Africa), whence it had been sent under the 
direction of M. Aubry-le-Comte, now Curator of the Paris Colonial 
Museum. I could obtain only very vague information at Paris as to 
the nature of the fruit and the plant to which this seed belongs, and 
it is only recently that I have been enabled to examine them at Kew. 
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