"Indigenous Flowers of the Hawaiian Islands” — St. John 
141 
Waialeale. Mrs. Sinclair is not known to have 
had technical botanical training, but she had 
artistic ability and a love of flowers. Over the 
years she made a series of water color paint- 
ings of wild flowers and, as is remarkable for 
that period, saved herbarium specimens to 
validate them. These specimens she sent to 
the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England, 
and she acknowledges the scientific identifica- 
tions of these, reported to her by the director. 
Sir Joseph D. Hooker. Having carefully ob- 
tained these scientific names and incorporated 
them, she prepared the book with colored 
lithograph plates and had it printed in Lon- 
don. The book, in small folio size, was well 
printed. It has a full title page and a dedica- 
tion "To the Hawaiian Chiefs and People who 
have been my most appreciative friends, and 
most lenient critics, this work is affectionately 
inscribed." There is a two-page introduction, 
discussing the Hawaiian flora, climate, de- 
structive agencies, habitats, Hawaiian verna- 
cular names formerly generally known to the 
Hawaiian people, and the difficulties of flower 
painting in the tropics. It was signed at Ma- 
kaweli, Kauai, May, 1884. There is also a 
postscript, thanking Sir Joseph D. Hooker 
for the identifications, signed in London, 
February, 1885. From this it appears that when 
in London she finished the manuscript and 
oversaw the printing of the book. 
The table of contents lists the 44 plates and 
the common and scientific names of the 45 
plants illustrated. For each plate there is a 
page of text with a brief popular description 
of the plant, observations on its growth or 
occurrence, and uses. Often there are com- 
ments on similar or related plants that grow 
in New Zealand, the colony from which the 
Sinclair, Gay, and Robinson families had 
migrated to Hawaii. 
In the introduction Mrs. Sinclair stated 
clearly, "The following collection of flowers 
was made upon the islands of Kauai and 
Niihau, the most northern of the Hawaiian 
Archipelago. It is not by any means a large 
collection, considering that the flowering 
plants of the islands are said by naturalists 
to exceed four hundred varieties. But this 
enumeration was made some years ago, and 
it is probable that many plants have become 
extinct since then." 
The specimens corresponding to these plates 
are still in the herbarium at Kew near London. 
For geographic data they all bear simply the 
word Hawaii. Monographers of Hawaiian 
plant groups who have used the Kew Herb- 
arium have commonly studied and cited these 
specimens. Usually they are cited in their 
publications as from Hawaii, and often the 
monographer has interpreted this as meaning 
the island of Hawaii, not merely the Kingdom 
of Hawaii or the Hawaiian Islands as a group 
or archipelago. They have overlooked the pre- 
cise statement in Mrs. Sinclair’s book that all 
the plants were collected and painted in her 
home regions on Kauai and Niihau islands. 
The extensive flora of the island of Kauai is 
fairly well known, but that of the island of 
Niihau has been imperfectly known and little 
recorded. For these reasons it has seemed de- 
sirable to try to separate the Sinclair plant 
records into those from Kauai and those from 
Niihau. After long search no such written 
record has been found at Kew, or among the 
Robinson family libraries on Niihau or Kauai, 
or in their early manuscript journals. 
The only other method of sorting the plant 
records between Kauai and Niihau seems to 
be by consideration of the known botanical 
identity and geographic occurrence and by 
the Hawaiian vernacular names. The follow- 
ing analysis has been done by that method. 
On one line are listed the plate number, the 
vernacular name, and the scientific name as 
they occur in "Indigenous Flowers of the 
Hawaiian Islands," and the currently accepted 
scientific name or redetermination. Any com- 
ments on the species are on following lines. 
