38 AMERICAN MIDLAND NATURALIST 
toward completion, besides many books of notes made from 
nature alone; all these among the fruits of his eleven years of 
assiduous travel in and within sight of the mountains. _ 
After three more years of study at home—making an aggregate 
of fourteen years of almost uninterrupted research on his chosen 
subject—any man at all covetous of contemporary fame would 
have finished and published his volumes; yet in 1850 he made 
another journey to the Pyrenees; and this was reiterated during 
five more consecutive summers. By this time Bubani was fifty 
years old. He had now devoted in all seventeen seasons to Pyre- 
naean field work, giving as many winters, as well as three whole 
years to the manuscript of his Flora. Would he not now add 
the final touches and give it to the waiting public? He did indeed 
complete the draft of it; and then, in place of giving it to the 
printer, he took it with him and went back to the mountains; 
and this was repeated during five more seasons in succession; 
his last journey thither, the twentieth, having been made in 
1862. On this final expedition the last contributions were made 
to his great herbarium of Pyrenaean botany, a collection which 
afterwards found its place of safe keeping in the Royal Institute 
of Botany of Genoa. But again, having now in 1862 put a 
period to his long years of field study and observation, eleven 
years more were consecrated to revision and amendment of the 
manuscript, which finally, in the year 1873, he could regard as 
finished. It was not, however, even now his mind to publish it 
at once; for at the very outset of his undertaking, he had made 
something like a solemn vow not to let the work go to the press 
until after he should have devoted forty years to its preparation. 
In 1875 he had effected yet other corrections and improvements; 
and he recorded a few more each year thereafter until the 25th 
of July, 1880. The work had now engaged his energies, mental 
and physical, during some four years over the forty which he so 
early resolved to give to it. Why he did not now commit it to the 
press no one has told us. It does not appear to have been for 
want of means; but the man was now 74 years of age, and very 
probably one possessed of the ardent temperament that was this 
man’s, and having worked as he had done incessantly for at least 
sixty years at high pressure, may find hismelf old at 74, so as no 
longer to feel equal to the final difficult and trying task of reading 
