Two accounts of Mr. Mitten's life and work have appeared, 

 one in the Journal of Botany for October, 1906, by W. Botting 

 Hemsley and the other in the Bryologist for January, 1907, by 

 William Edward Nicholson, both of which are interesting per- 

 sonal sketches, the latter giving a bibliographical list, but neither 

 of them containing any account of his collections. In a letter 

 dated September 5, 1906, Dr. Wallace states that "Nobody 

 ever touched, or hardly ever saw these collections but Mr. 

 Mitten himself and a few specialist visitors. Although I have 

 never examined them myself, as a friend (and a son-in-law) of 

 Mr. Mitten for forty years, I know something of them and I am 

 inclined to think that they constitute the richest (or nearly the 

 richest) private collection of those groups in existence, while it is 

 doubtful if any public collections are much richer. Mr. Mitten, 

 as you know, has studied and described mosses for nearly sixty 

 years, and for a long time was the greatest British authority on 

 them, and received collections to sort, name, and describe from 

 collectors, museums, and travelers, in every part of the world. 

 Of all these he reserved sets for himself, and has thus accumu- 

 lated an enormous collection, the nomenclature and arrangement 

 of which he was at work at up to the end of his life." 



Beginning in 185 1 with a list of mosses and hepatics from the 

 vicinity of his home in Sussex, the 57 titles which follow include 

 studies of the mosses and hepatics from Quito, Portugal, New 

 Zealand, Panama, the East Indies, Tasmania, Fiji, Tropical 

 Africa, the Azores, Japan and China, Samoa, Ceylon, St. Paul, 

 and St. Helena, Bermuda, Kerguelen, Cape of Good Hope, 

 Morocco, Polynesia, British Guiana, Socotra and Borneo. 



His largest and chief work was the description of the mosses 

 of South America, including Central American and West Indian 

 species. This was published as Vol. 12 of the Journal of the 

 Linnean Society in 1869. It contains 659 pages and includes 

 603 species and 19 genera new to the region, of which the types 

 are in his herbarium. It was largely based on the collections 

 made by Richard Spruce in his travels up the Amazon, Orinoco 

 and Rio Negro and across the Andes, and by Jameson, in Peru ; 

 as well as those made by Lindig and Weir in New Granada ; 



