\4cfl- 
INTRODUCTION. 
T he earliest contribution to our knowledge of the Marine Vege¬ 
tation of the Faeroes was made, so far as I know, by Jorgen 
Landt, who in his book »Forsog til en Beskrivelse over Faer 0 erne«, 
Kjobenhavn 1800, mentions about 30 species of which some are 
easily recognizable, though others of the species which he reports 
from the Faeroes, e. g. Fucus serratus and Conferva corallina, must 
undoubtedly be due to some error as they have not been found since; 
whilst with regard to others again, it is impossible to ascertain with 
any certainty what is meant. 
The next and in every way most important contribution which 
has hitherto been published was that of the Rev. Hans Christian 
Lyngbye who visited the Faeroes in the year 1817 with the sup¬ 
port of the Danish Government. The results of this journey are 
embodied in his famous work »Tentamen Hydrophytologiae Danicae«, 
published in 1819. In this work, in which Lyngbye describes 
several new genera and species on the strength of the material col¬ 
lected in the Faeroes, some 100 Faeroese species and varieties are 
enumerated. In the case of several of these species the name given 
by Lyngbye has been retained up to the present time, while others 
have been re-named. And, more particularly with regard to these 
latter, the fact that Lyngbye’s Herbarium is preserved in the Bo¬ 
tanical Museum in Copenhagen, has been of great importance to 
me, as I have constantly been able to consult the specimens to which 
he refers in Hydrophytologia and to revise his old determinations. 
While the determinations of the greater part of the species were, 
on the whole, easy enough to revise, there were some which caused 
difficulty owing partly to the material of the species contained in 
Lyngbye’s Herbarium being old and decayed, and partly and more 
Botany of the Faeroes. 22 
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