archipelago into its floral provinces. Fortunately all necessity for 

 depending on it is rapidly disappearing. 



With the exception of Vidal and Loher, the Spaniards and the 

 collectors other than Cuming have failed to furnish any substan- 

 tial additional information on this point. 



Blanco's Flora de Filipinas, of which the first edition appeared 

 in 1837, described many species and even genera as new and 

 identified the remainder with those of other regions. Many of his 

 species and a itw of his genera were good, but the descriptions 

 were often incomplete and sometimes inaccurate, and long proved 

 a stumbling-block in the path of European systematists, who 

 attempted to correlate them with the Mala}'an and continental 

 floras. One of Mr. Merrill's greatest achievements lies in the 

 work done towards clearing up these species, and it may now be 

 said that nearly all of them are at last satisfactorily known. 



The most comprehensive treatment of this flora as a whole is 

 the Novissima Appendix, published as a part of the third edition 

 of the Flora de Filipinas. This is the work of two authors of 

 very unequal merit. Naves, who did most of the monocotyle- 

 dons, was capable of identifying and enumerating exotic species 

 as Philippine, by the leaves alone or on the reports of the natives, 

 even recording in a few cases orchids from the Andes or western 

 Africa, although he failed to find a majority of those collected by 

 Cuming on his own island. The other author, Fernandez-Vil- 

 lar, was evidently a man of profound ability, but in his determina- 

 tions he constantly referred Philippine to Malayan or Indian 

 species, wrongly in very many cases. Except where they had 

 been represented in Cuming's and other collections and formed 

 the bases of descriptions, he so far ignored the endemic species 

 that he added a bare half dozen, whereas in the last four years 

 some six or seven hundred have been published as new, and 

 many others so diagnosed will doubtless appear shortly. 



It should be remembered that these Spanish authors had either 

 little or no material from outside for comparison, that they sent 

 no specimens to outside herbaria to be named, and that if they 

 preserved any material it has disappeared. 



The only Spaniard to appreciate the necessity for such assistance 



