THE HISTORY OF THE BOTANICAL MAGAZINE XXV 
SECOND PERIOD: 1801—1826. 
Dr. John Sims became editor of the Botanical Magazine 
soon after the death of William Curtis, though his name 
first appears on the title-page of vol. xv., 1801. He was a 
native of Canterbury, born in 1749; and the present editor 
of the Gardeners’ Chronicle is a lateral descendant of the 
same family. I have found no published biography of Sims, 
and only know him through his botanical works ; but Sir 
Henry Pitman, of the Royal College of Physicians, has kindly 
supplied a few particulars of his life. He passed the session 
of 1773-4 at Leyden, and then returned to Hdinburgh, 
where he took the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1774. 
Subsequently he settled in London, was admitted a licen- 
tiate of the College of Physicians in 1779, and soon became 
a prominent member of his profession. He retired from 
the editorship of the Botanical Magazine in 1826, and died 
at Dorking in 1831, aged eighty-two. 
In a short preface to his first volume of the Botanical 
Magazine, Sims explains that little use had latterly been 
made of the materials left by Curtis, for several reasons, 
‘‘ principally from a desire to preserve them as entire as 
possible for the service of the proprietors, in case of emer- 
gency, and a wish to indulge our botanical readers with a 
representation and description of some of the novel and 
curious plants which are annually introduced, particularly 
from the Cape of Good Hope.” Mention is also made of 
assistance received from John Bellenden-Gawler, who after- 
wards changed his name to John Bellenden-Ker. He 
specially studied the Iridex, and contributed largely to the 
magazine during Sims’s editorship; and finally, in 1827, 
published separately at Brussels a paper entitled Genera 
Iridearum. . A. Salisbury and Dean Herbert also paid 
great attention to this and the allied natural orders Liliaceze 
and Amaryllidacex, which, as well as Heaths, were then so 
extensively cultivated and assiduously studied, that one 
might justly designate this as the period of bulbous plants 
and Heaths. Thus, for instance, upwards of two-thirds of 
the figures in the sixteenth volume represent the former 
class of plants. 
The volumes of the period now under consideration 
comprise xv. to liii. Volume xx. contains general indexes 
to the plants contained in the first twenty volumes of the 
Botanical Magazine, comprehending an alphabetical Latin 
index, an alphabetical English index, an enumeration of the 
plants figured in the order of publication, with corrections 
