BUBANI’S FLORA PYRENAEA 39 
the proofs of two thousand two hundred pages of most critical 
matter in small type. 
Yet Bubani lived on, and apparently in health, during eight 
years more, then died suddenly in 1888, at the age of 82 years. 
He had committed the care of his great manuscript to his daughter, 
with directions as to its publication. 
If it was something like the languor and listlessness of old 
age which prevented the printing of the volumes in his own life- 
time, then extraordinary must have been Bubani’s faith in a 
succeeding generation of botanists, or in some one of his younger 
contemporaries, to whom the superintendence of the publishing 
was to be confidently entrusted. Such a thoroughly competent 
and conscientiously faithful friend was found in Professor Otto 
Penzig, of the Royal Institute of Botany at Genoa, and only 
some eight or nine years after Bubani’s demise the printing of the 
Flora was begun. Volume I. was issued in 1897; II. in 1900, and 
both III. and IV. in 1901. The four volumes of this Flora aggregate 
2174 pages in quarto; and the author’s every line is in Latin. 
It was not, then, designed to be a popular botany of the region. 
It was meant to be adapted to the wants of botanists almost 
exclusively, and one may venture to say, to botanists of very high 
attainment in particular, it may even be for those of future genera- 
tions, more than for us, his later contemporaries. Some such 
conclusion as this might have been reached without knowledge 
of the volumes themselves, and deductively. That a man of 
uncommon erudition, keen intelligence and unflagging energy 
had given all the years of earlier and later manhood to the task, 
and had been willing to cease from life with it still unpublished, 
would argue that he had all the while felt himself to be laboring 
in behalf of posterity. 
The eighteenth was of all the centuries the one most prolific 
of botanical books of great worth, and of predestined long useful- 
ness. It was the century that gave the priceless volumes of the 
De Candolles and the Hookers, of Robert Brown, of Lindley 
and of Bentham, of Kunth, Endlicher and Engler and Prantl, 
of Ferdinand Mueller, of Cassini, Boissier and Baillon, Parlatore, 
Caruel, Saccardo, and, on our side of the Atlantic, of Nuttall, of 
Torrey and of Asa Gray; and every one of these enjoyed during 
long years the glory and the praise that were their due. Bubani 
was the contemporary of them all, lacked but sixteen years of 
