180 
The Philippine Journal of Science 
1915 
the species definitely known from the Philippines have been men- 
tioned, less than 100 of the species enumerated as Philippine 
have been shown to have been admitted on erroneous identifica- 
tions. In our current work corrections are published as errors 
are detected, and future corrections are to be expected as oppor- 
tunity is had critically to compare current collections of Philip- 
pine plants with types and authentically named specimens. Due 
to the differences in individual opinion as to what constitutes 
a species, and the well-known difficulties in interpreting species 
briefly described by the older authors, it is not to be expected that 
all errors have been eliminated in our recent work on the Philip- 
pine flora. Errors are now more apt to be on the side of too 
freely describing new species, than in erroneously referring 
recently collected Philippine material to Malayan and Asiatic 
species previously described. 
A less important source of error is that of wrongly or im- 
perfectly labelled botanical material in various herbaria. Here 
may well be considered also those errors due to the inadvertent 
interchange of labels, such mixtures not being uncommon in large 
herbaria. The chief Philippine collection in which mixed labels 
occur is that secured by the naturalists of the Malaspina Ex- 
pedition, including material collected and prepared by both 
Haenke and Nee. A number of specimens cited by Cavanilles, 
Lagasca, and Presl, as Philippine, from Nee’s and Haenke’s 
collections, certainly never originated in the Archipelago, and 
the Philippine records are due to erroneously labelled specimens. 
Most of the species, thus erroneously recorded as Philippine, 
are described in Cavanilles’s “leones” and in Presl’s “Reliquiae 
Haenkeanae.” 
The Malaspina Expedition, 1789-1794, proceeded from Spain 
to the east coast of South America, around Cape Horn, and 
northward along the coast to a point north of Sitka, Alaska, 
thence southward to Acapulco. From Acapulco the ships pro- 
ceeded to Manila via Mulgrave (=Milne) Island (Marshall Is- 
lands) and Guam; from Manila southward to the southern point 
on New Zealand, thence to Sydney and from Sydney to Callao, 
Peru, via the Tonga Islands. From Callao the expedition pro- 
ceeded around Cape Horn to Spain. Botanical collections were 
made at all, or at most points, where stops were made. Col- 
meiro 4 is authority for the statement that the collection of Nee 
alone comprised over 10,000 species, of which 4,000 were new. 
) 
j 
, 
1 La botanica y los botanicos de la peninsula Hispano-Lusitiana (1858) 
182. 
