14 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY, 



PRITZEL'S " INDEX." 

 By B. Daydon Jackson, Ph.D., Gen. Sec. L.S. 



[Read January 28, 1919 ; Capt. A. W. Hill, M.A., D.Sc, in the Chair.] 



I have been honoured with an invitation to say a few words this 

 afternoon upon " Pritzel, and the necessity for a Revision of his 

 work, and the call on all Horticulturists to support it." 



There are two aspects of a discourse such as this : First, the 

 author may have chosen his own subject, one which he has specially 

 studied, and in which he hopes to enlist the interest of his audience, 

 presumably less informed On it than himself ; and second, where 

 the author has been provided with a subject in which many of 

 his audience are interested already, some being possibly as well 

 acquainted with it as himself, while a few may even excel him in 

 that point. In the latter case, the speaker has a claim on the 

 forbearance of his audience. 



In the first place, who was the author ? Georg August Pritzel 

 was born, as Mr. Gerald Loder reminds us in the Gardeners' 

 Chronicle, at Carolath, in Silesia, on September 2, 1815. The 

 obituary notices give practically no details of his life, but from the 

 " Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie " we learn that he grew up in 

 poor circumstances, until at the age of 36 he secured an appoint- 

 ment as assistant in the Royal Library, Berlin. This was in the 

 year 1851, which witnessed the completion of his well-known 

 " Thesaurus literaturae botanicae omnium gentium " (the treasure 

 of botanic literature of all nations), which was issued in parts 

 from 1847 to 1 85 1. It looks, therefore, as if the issue of this 

 important work drew attention to his merits and gained him the 

 appointment in question. 



How he maintained himself during the period between the com- 

 pletion of his academic training and the publication of the first part 

 of his " Thesaurus " seems to be unrecorded. We get a glimpse 

 from the fact that in 1843 Schauer and Walpers independently 

 proposed Pritzelia for genera which have not been maintained ; this 

 recognition of Pritzel 's merits is presumably due to the publication 

 of his " Anemonarum revisio " in the year previous, from the journal 

 Linnaea. 



Four years afterwards his second important work, and that 

 which specially appeals to this Society, came out : his " Icones 

 Botanicarum Index Locupletissimus ; Verzeichniss der Abbildungen 

 sichtbar bliihender Pflanzen und Farnkrauter aus der botanischen 

 und Gartenliteratur des XVIII. und XIX. Jahrhunderts in alpha- 



