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of which the chief was by Llanos, intended to contain corrections 

 and additions to Blanco's Flora ; but far inferior to the original. 

 During the years from 1877 to 1883 there appeared the succes- 

 sive parts of the third, grand, or Augustinian, edition of the Flora 

 de Filipinas, so-called because all the writers belonged to that 

 order. It is perhaps the most sumptuous botanical publication 

 of recent years, composed of four large folio volumes of text, 

 and two others containing 480 plates, all elegantly printed upon 

 heavy paper. It contained Blanco's second edition and Llanos' 

 papers, with hardly any change except the addition of a Latin ver- 

 sion, Mercado's medicinal treatise, and, above all, the Novissima 

 Appendix, compiled by Frs. Celestino Fernandez- Villar and 

 Andres Naves. The latter took the monocotyledons, but fortu- 

 nately was unable to complete them, and Villar wrote up the 

 grasses and part of the sedges, besides all dicotyledons. They 

 accumulated a fine library and were able to find nearly all the 

 references to Philippine botany published elsewhere. But in 

 another way these books proved their undoing, for they acted on 

 the fixed principle that they would find in them identifications 

 of almost every plant they collected. They had very few speci- 

 mens from other countries for comparison, consequently their 

 specific errors were very numerous, and as they rarely give more 

 than the name, synonymy, and location of their plants, in a high 

 percentage of the cases we shall never know what they had. 

 But Villar was almost always right so far as the genus was con- 

 cerned, his interpretation of specific limits was most conservative, 



Philippine flora can at present get it only from this source. For 

 more concise and accurate summaries and, above all, for discussion 

 of the relations shown with other countries, nothing so far com- 

 pares with papers written by R. A. Rolfe of Kew. 



The literary and mechanical supervision of the Flora was en- 

 trusted to two brothers, Domingo and Sebastian Vidal, but the 

 former died when only a small part had appeared. The latter, 

 besides this, did work of a different kind, and he alone of his 

 countrymen has left behind that which assists rather than ham- 

 pers the students of the subject. For however fascinating and 



