BIOGRAPHY 
xxix 
beloved mosses." From some passages in his letters it is evident 
that Mr. Borrer advanced him a sum of money to be repaid by 
the first set of his Pyrenean collections. He had intended to 
leave in April, but at the beginning of that month scarlet fever 
attacked Welburn, and three of his little half-sisters out of four 
who were attacked, died of it. 
He was able to leave, however, at the end of April, and after 
spending a few days in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux, he 
reached Pau early in May, and devoted his whole time and 
energies till the following March in collecting and studying the 
beautiful flowers and unexpectedly interesting mosses of the 
Pyrenees. All his previous inquiries had led him to believe that 
mosses were few in number and of common species ; and the 
French collections he examined before reaching the mountains 
showed this to be the case. In a letter to Mr. Borrer dated 
October 29, after he had been four months in the mountains, he 
writes : " As the result of my wanderings I have now to show 
most of the rarest flowers of the Pyrenees, a great many of which 
have been gathered at heights of from 9000 to 10,000 feet, and 
even upwards, and cannot, in fact, be obtained without climbing 
thus high ; while my Cryptogamic recolte may now fairly be called 
iminense, . . . The rotten trunks of trees furnish quite a garden 
of Jungermannige throughout the Pyrenees. . . . The two best 
stations for Cryptogams I have found to be Cauterets and 
Bagneres de Luchon ; at the former place I stayed three and at 
the latter above five weeks. I can easily conceive why so few 
mosses have been gathered in the Pyrenees ; for the flowers are 
so numerous, so varied, and so beautiful, that no person who was 
not, like myself, quite entete of Bryology would deign to pick up 
a humble moss ! In a guide-book to the environs of Luchon, of 
some scientific pretensions and containing some two or three 
chapters on Botany, it is even said ' la famille des Mousses 
n'existe pas dans les Pyrenees ' ! Yet of all places in the 
Pyrenees, the valleys, lakes, and cascades in the vicinity of Luchon 
are the most prolific in mosses. Above the region of forests 
mosses become very scarce ; the rocks are too exposed to the 
heat of the Pyrenean sun to permit them to flourish. It is in 
the immense forests of beech, elm, etc., that I have made my 
richest harvest." And towards the end of the same letter he 
writes : " From what I have said you will begin to see that I am 
satisfied with my expedition. It is true I have traversed many a 
weary mile and found very little in the way of mosses, but this 
must always be the case with a first explorer, and on the whole I 
am well content with my success. Whether or not my collection 
