460 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 



spection and determination of type-specimens. To this end 

 he made journeys to the continent every year from 1830 to 

 1834, visiting nearly all the public and larger private herbaria. 



In the years during which the monograph of Labiatce was 

 in progress, Mr. Bentham elaborated and published the earlier 

 of the papers which have particularly connected his name 

 with North American botany. These are, first, the reports 

 on some of the new ornamental plants raised in the Horticul- 

 tural Society's Garden from seeds collected in western North 

 America by Douglas, under the auspices of that society, by 

 which were first made known to botanists and florists so many 

 of the characteristic genera and species of Oregon and Cali- 

 fornia, now familiar in gardens, Gilias and Nemophilas, Lim- 

 nanthes, Phacelias, Brodiaeas, Calochorti, Eschscholtzias, Col- 

 linsias, and the like ; then the monograph of Hydrophyllece 

 (1834), followed the next year by that on Hosackia, and that 

 on the Eriogonece, — all American and chiefly North Ameri- 

 can plants, — the first-fruits of a great harvest which even 

 now has not wholly been gathered in ; the field is so vast, 

 though the laborers have not been few. Later, the " Plantae 

 Hartwegianae," an octavo volume begun in 1839, but finished 

 in 1857 with the Californian collections ; and in 1844, the 

 " Botany of the Voyage of the Sulphur," in quarto, the first 

 part of which relates to Californian botany. The various pa- 

 pers upon South American botany are even more numerous ; 

 one of them being that in which Heliamphora, of British 

 Guiana, a new genus of Pitcher Plants, of the Sarracenia 

 family, was established. 



Bentham's labors upon the great order LeguminoscB began 

 early, with his " Commentationes de Leguminosarum Generi- 

 bus," published in the Annals of the Vienna Museum, being 

 the work of a winter's holiday (1836-7) passed in that capital 

 in the herbarium then directed by Endlicher. This was fol- 

 lowed by a series of papers, mostly monographs of genera, 

 in Hooker's "Journal of Botany," in the "Journal of the 

 Linnsean Society," and elsewhere, by the elaboration of the 

 order for the imperial " Flora Brasiliensis," and later, by the 

 " Revision of the Genus Cassia," and that of the suborder 



