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very regretfully, that for the present, at all events, we must appa- 

 rently part with the two plants which I had placed under R. 

 ni : iucl tt »las as vars. R. Briggsii and R. Bagnallii, unless the former is 

 really to be found now at Henfield, Suss. I have Mr. Bagnall's 

 authority for saying that R. Bagnallii is almost certainly a thing of 

 the past in Warw., the only county where it has been found, and 

 there seems every reason to fear that the same is true of R. Briggsii 

 as a Dev. plant. Both appear to be only anomalous forms. 



IN MEMOBY OP EICHAED SPRUCE. 



By the death of the celebrated botanist and traveller, Eichaed 

 Spruce, at the close of the past year, the botanical world has sus- 

 tained a heavy and irreparable loss. Mr. Spruce fell a victim to an 

 attack of influenza, followed by pneumonia. Born Sept. 10, 1817, 

 at Ganthorpe, in the North Riding, he devoted the leisure time 

 of his early life to the botany of the moors and dales of the district. 

 His earliest writings appeared in 1841, in vol. i. of the Phytologist. 

 At that time he was on the staff of the Collegiate School at York. 

 In the following year he was elected a Fellow of the Botanical 

 Society of Edinburgh, in whose Transactions in after years he pub- 

 lished the most important of his contributions to science. His short 

 visit to Dr. Thomas Taylor in Ireland in the same year is of interest, 

 for to it may doubtless be traced the intense zeal with which he 

 subsequently threw himself into the study of the Muscinece. After 

 dealing with the Mosses and Hepatics of Eskdale (Phytologist, i. 

 540-544) and Teesdale (Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist. 1844, 191-203, 

 271-283), he produced in 1845 a list of all the species that were 

 known to occur in Yorkshire (Phytologist, ii. 147-157). At the 

 same time he announced that, being in bad health, he was about 

 to start on a botanical expedition to the Pyrenees and the South of 

 Spain. The latter region he did not reach, but he spent a year in 

 the Pyrenees, collecting flowering and cryptogamic plants. He 

 described his experiences in three letters to Sir William Hooker, 

 which were published in the Journal of Botany for 1846. He dis- 

 tributed his Pyrenean Muscinece in published sets, and worked them 

 up in a most suggestive paper of 113 pp. (Ann. Maa. Xut. I list. 

 1849-50, and Trans. Hot. s„r. Edinb. 1850), which marked him out 

 as one of the most promising bryologists of the period. 



He was now on the threshold of the most important epoch of his 

 career— his extensive travels on the continent of South America. 

 On July 12th, 1849, he arrived at Para, and began making those 

 admirable collections which have contributed so much to our 

 knowledge of the rich vegetation of equatorial America. Slowly 

 working his way up the river Amazon, he reached Santarem, 

 where he found Dr. Alfred Eussel Wallace engaged in zoological 



After exploring the river Trombetas and one of its branches 

 almost to the frontier of British Guiana, he returned to Santarem, 



