“ VICTORTA RROIA — THE EMBLEM OE THE SOCIETY 
91 
the plant to be named for her, and they commissioned Professor John 
Lindley of University College to write it u]). Under the name T ictorid 
regia, he described the water-lily in an outsize pamphlet of three pages 
with one plate, of wdiich only twenty-five copies were printed. The pre- 
face was dated October 1837 and it was reprinted with some additional 
matter in the Botanical Begister the following February (Lindley, 1838). 
The type-specimen of Victoria regia is the sheet of Schombnrgk’s gather- 
ing in Lindley ’s herbarium at Cambridge. 
Tt is evident that the arrival of the description, drawings and speci- 
mens of the Royal Water-lily caused a great sensation, not only in the 
botanical world but amongst the British public in general. We may be 
proud that it was at a meeting of our forerunners that they were first 
exhibited. But it is to be regretted that they led to a race for publica- 
tion between Gray and Lindley and hence to the acrimonious correspon- 
dence which ensued at a later date (Gray, 1850; Lindley, 1851 ; Hooker, 
1851). Reading this a century later it seems clear that both men were 
actuated by the highest motives. Gray’s publications seem to have had 
the sole object of securing publication on behalf of Schomburgk, and in 
doing this he made the minimum use of his own name. Lindley’s object 
was to carry out the commission of the Geographical Society who had 
sent out the collector. The unsatisfactory situation was almost inevitable 
from the duplication of the material and the way it was sent to this 
country. Perhaps, therefore, it is fortunate that questions of priority 
over the publication of the accounts of these two botanists are of rela- 
tively little importance. As will be shown below, Lindley’s Victoria 
regia, wliich has been accepted for so long, must give way to an earlier 
name. 
Before discussing this, a few facts about the life of the collector of 
the water-lily deserve mention. Robert Hermann Schomburgk was born 
in Silesia in 1804. Much of his life was spent in travel in little known 
parts of the world and he rendered very valuable services to botany. 
The Botanical Society of London honoured him by election as a Foreign 
iMember at their meeting of April 20, 1838. In 1844 he was knighted 
(and it seems not unlikely that the discovery of a plant named for the 
Queen may have had some influence in this), and in 1859 he was elected 
F.R.S. He died near Berlin in 1865. 
Schomburgk’s discovery of the Royal Water-lily was the first to be 
brought to the notice of British liotanists, but it was not new to science. 
It appears that the species was first noticed by Haenke in the province 
of Moxos, Bolivia, in about 1801, but, owing to the death of this botanist 
in the Philippines before the end of his expedition, the plant was not 
described. In 1819, Bonpland found a giant water-lily near Corrientes, 
Argentina, which was again seen there hy D’Orbigny in 1827, wdien 
specimens and drawings were sent to Paris. This Argentine plant is the 
closely related V . Cruziana D’Orbigny but its author refound the species 
we have known as V. regia in Bolivia in 1833. In 1832, Poeppig found 
the latter on the Amazons, and he described it in the same year as 
Kuryalr anuizonicn (Poejipig, 1832). 
