228 THE ORCHID REVIEW. (AUGUST, 1914, 
unexplained appearance in the lonely spot to which he had walked 
unaccompanied. Dr. Robinson is said to have been very popular with 
the natives and with their children, and frequently made journeys alone. 
His death caused general mourning among the population of Amboina. 
Dr. Robinson was a British subject, a citizen of Nova Scotia, and was for 
two years in residence at Christ’s College, Cambridge. His untimely end 
is a great loss to botanical science. 
Kien HERBARIA AND THEIR USE. Fee] 
HE opening of the Reichenbachian Herbarium, and the assurance of 
Prof. Zahlbruckner (pp. 206, 207) that its contents are undamaged 
after their long incarceration, is a matter of the greatest interest to 
Orchidists, and serves to call attention to the use of Herbaria generally. 
A Herbarium is a collection of samples of the world’s Flora, and its value 
depends entirely upon the completeness of its contents and the accuracy 
with which they are named and classified. An explorer may visit some 
unknown country and bring home a collection of dried specimens to 
illustrate the plants that he met with during his travels. They will be 
more or less localised, and may be accompanied by sketches, and notes of 
colour, station or altititude, in which case their value is much increased. 
In course of time they will be named by some botanist, and technical 
descriptions published, so that the plants may be identified by those who 
subsequently visit the same country or may meet with them elsewhere. 
The specimens then become the ,types of these descriptions and the 
ultimate standards of comparison in all cases of doubt or confusion in the 
future. But if these descriptions are incomplete, or unaccompanied by 
dimensions or figures, or if any of the technical terms are used in some 
unusual sense, it may not be possible to identify the plants from the 
descriptions alone, hence the importance of the types, or of fully 
authenticated specimens of the same species. 
This is precisely what has happened in the case of the Reichenbachian 
Herbarium. Numerous collections of dried specimens were made PY 
Orchid collectors, as Wagener, Schlim, Roezl, Wallis, Lehmann, and 
others too numerous to mention, and the specimens were forwarded to 
Reichenbach, who named them, and published characteristically imperfect 
descriptions, from which it is often impossible to identify the plants. The 
would not have mattered so much if the specimens had been accessible 19 
the ordinary way, but it is notorious that they were not, and the difficulty, 
though not felt so much during the eccentric author’s lifetime, has been 
greatly intensified by the extraordinary provisions of his Will, which has 
