REVISION OF FLORA PATAGONICA. 



PREFACE. 



WHEN the lamented John B. Hatcher and his assistants returned 

 from their geological trip through southern Patagonia, in 1896- 

 1899, they brought home with them, besides geological col- 

 lections, and some interesting zoological prizes, a collection of flowering 

 plants and mosses, which had been found in the region of the Rio Sta. 

 Cruz, and by Magellan Strait ; not far from the region in which the youth- 

 ful Charles Darwin made his famous observations on the growth of plants 

 as well as on the evolution of mountains. And although botany was only 

 a minor branch of my work in biology, I was requested by my colleague, 

 Professor W. B. Scott, chief editor of our Princeton Patagonian Reports, 

 to furnish a report on the Patagonian botany. In order to meet his wishes, 

 and in order to have the Mosses correctly determined and described, I 

 appealed to Dr. Per Dusen, of whose botanical researches in that country 

 I had seen high commendation in the columns of Nature. 



Dr. Dusen's reply and generous help as to the Bryophytes enabled me 

 to start and carry out the undertaking, so as to secure provisional identi- 

 fications of the flowering plants ; whilst Professor Evans, of Yale Univer- 

 sity, and Professor W. Lucien Underwood, of Massachusetts Institute of 

 Technology, helped me with the Hepaticae and the ferns. My portion of 

 the affair, on the Phanerogams, was carried out usually in the Philadelphia 

 Academy of Sciences, in the Bronx Botanical Museum of New York, 

 through the courtesy of Dr. N. L. Britton and Dr. J. K. Small ; and in 

 the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University, where the fair curator, Miss 

 Mary Anna Day, and the valuable South American specimens which bore 

 the handwriting of my beloved friend Asa Gray, were a great help. It 

 was impossible under these circumstances to make dissections ; and I \va^ 

 therefore compelled to content myself with prima facie comparisons. Yet 

 so correct a botanist as Professor Carl Skottsberg, of Uppsala University, 

 himself an experienced Patagonian explorer, is good enough to say, that, 



