PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, 



PRINCETON, N. J., November, 1905. 

 To PROFESSOR W. B. SCOTT, 



Dear Sir : 



Having been requested by you to take charge of the collections 

 of Patagonian plants made by the late Mr. John B. Hatcher and Mr. 

 O. A. Peterson, I have the honor to submit this volume as the outcome 

 of such measures as I was able to adopt. It consists of: (i) a gen- 

 eral sketch of the vegetation of Western Patagonia, hitherto little known, 

 which was prepared for me by Dr. Per Dusen, one of the leading explorers 

 of that section, and an expert in its botany; (2) the Hepaticae, or Liver- 

 worts, having been worked up by Professor Alexander W. Evans, of Yale 

 University, and reported on with descriptions and illustrations of new 

 species, in the Torrey Btilletin of August, 1898, here reproduced with 

 the permission of the author and the publishers ; (3) Dr. Dusen, who is 

 a specialist in Bryology, and an authority on the Mosses of Peraustral 

 America, has prepared for us a report on the Hatcher Mosses, with de- 

 scriptions and illustrations of the new species. This forms Part III, and 

 is partially simultaneous with the publication by the same author in the 

 Swedish Reports, describing the large collections of Mosses made by him- 

 self and others in connection with the Nordenskjold Swedish Exploration 

 in Southern and Western Patagonia. 



My own share of the work has consisted chiefly in examining and de- 

 scribing the Pteridophytes and the Flowering-plants of the Hatcher-Peter- 

 son collections, and also of a small collection by Mr. Barnum Brown, 

 entrusted to me by Director N. L. Britton, of the New York Botanical Gar- 

 den. Though there was not much new material in any of these collec- 

 tions, they proved to be valuable, as illustrating a very interesting and 

 instructive flora, with which northern botanists are not usually familiar. 

 In these circumstances it was judged desirable, with your concurrence, to 

 prepare a general summary of the species, with as much descriptive matter 

 as might enable one provisionally to identify them ; also with some notes 

 of their habitats and of their relations to plants in extern lands. (In a 



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