Odoardo Beccari. 
By I. H. Burkill and J. C. Moulton. 
At the age of seventy-seven, on October 26th, 1920, Odoardo 
Beccari, the great naturalist and traveller, died unexpectedly of 
heart failure in Florence. 
Beccari obtained a degree in the Natural Sciences at the Uni- 
versity of Bologna in 1864; and immediately after that met in 
Genoa the Marquis Giacomo Doria, already a traveller of note: 
there they planned together the first of Bec-cari’s four journeys to 
the wonderful East, — Beccari the botanist, and Doria the zoologist. 
The preparations for it took Beccari to London, and caused 
the commencement of his life-long connection with Kew. The 
two explorers set out in April, 1865, spent a short time in Oeylon, 
and reached Sarawak in June via Singapore, thereby starting 
Bec-cari’s fifteen years of busy collecting and travelling. It 
is well before anything else to state whither those years took 
him: — (1) in Sarawak with Doria until March, 1866, when the 
latter’s health gave way, and in Sarawak alone to January, 1868: 
(2) in Eritrea in the company of the Marquis 0. Antinori from 
February to October, 1870; (3) eastwards again, to New Guinea 
from November, 1871. with L. M. D 5 Albertis, who like Doria broke 
down; in the Aru and Kei islands from February to September, 
1873; in Celebes to June, 1874; in the Moluccas to January, 1875: 
in Dutch New Guinea to March, 1876; and then back to Florence 
in July of the same year; (4) in 1877 across India to Australia 
and New Zealand with E. D’ Albertis; and parting in Java at 
Batavia in 1878, alone for a final exploration in southern Sumatra. 
The wealth of the material got upon these travels was enor- 
mous: his first journey resulted in 20,000 botanical specimens re- 
presenting 3,300 species of the Higher Plants, in a collection of 
800 fruits in spirit, in a big collection of timber samples, and in 
his 48 orang-utans : his collections from Eritrea ran to 600 num- 
bers; and his later collections were upon the same scale, both 
botanical, zoological and ethnological. This vast store, so much of 
it got together in the Dutch Indies, the Government of the Nether- 
lands, it is said, wished to buy ; but Beccari preferred that it should 
go to Italy, whence he distributed his duplicates liberally. The 
botanical and ethnological parts now lie at Florence, and the 
zoological part at Genoa. 
Intrepid, and yet very wise in his dealings with the wild tribes, 
Beccari wandered almost alone where few white men have been 
able to go. His visit to the lvapuas region of central Borneo is a 
case in point; his climbing of the Arfak mountains in New Guinea 
Jour. Straits Branch 
