373 
XXXIX.— Prodromus Florae Novo-Gran atensis, ou Enumera¬ 
tion des Plantes de la Nouvelle-Grenade avec description 
des Esr&CES nouvelles. Par MM. J. Triana et J. E. Planchon. 
Annales des Sciences Naturelles, ser. 4, vol. xvii. Botanique (to be 
continued and reissued as a separate publication). 
Memoirs sur la Famille des Guttieeres. Par J. E. Planchon, 
D.M. et Jose Triana, D.M. Annales des Sciences Naturelles, ser. 
4, vols. xiii to xvi., (reissued in a separate volume). Paris, 1862. 
These two papers are good examples of the two classes most to 
be recommended to partial workers in systematic botany, as useful 
contributions to science, although in different degrees—a critical 
enumeration of all the plants of a country, and a monograph of all 
the species of a group—-the one more practically useful to the inves¬ 
tigator of the vegetable productions of the particular country re¬ 
ferred to, the other always a much greater step in the advancement 
of science. Although one of them is as yet a commencement only, 
we here take them together as being by the same authors, the one 
having as it were grown out of the other. Both papers are dis¬ 
tinguished by accuracy of observation and soundness of views, and 
illustrate well the comparative merits of each class of works. 
Dr. Jose Triana, an active and intelligent young botanist, a native, 
as we believe, or at any rate a citizen of New Grenada, was employed 
in the chorographic expedition organized under the administration of 
General J. H. Lopez, and after six years of travel through the 
various provinces of that republic, he came over to Paris in 1857, 
for the purpose of determining the specimens he had collected, with 
a view to compiling, for the benefit of his countrymen, a popular 
work on the vegetable productions of their territory. The first in¬ 
spection, however, of the herbaria of Paris and London showed him 
how little was as yet really known of the vast botanical treasures of 
that luxuriant district of tropical America, and that a compilation 
was impossible for want of any scientific investigation on which it 
could be founded. Lie therefore changed his plan, and having secured 
the collaboration of Dr. Planchon, whose guidance as to the scientific 
portion of the work was essential, and having, after much negotiation, 
obtained the indispensable sanction and promise of support from 
the Government of his country, he set earnestly to work at a general 
Flora of New Grenada. For this he had excellent materials. Besides 
his own collections and those remitted to him by M. Linden, he had 
all those of the Herbarium of the Jardin des Plantes, where he 
worked, and he was enabled to borrow much from the herbaria of 
Delessert, De Candolle, Boissier, and Sagot. For the necessary con¬ 
sultation of books he was not so well off. The library of the bota¬ 
nical department of the Jardin des Plantes is confined to a few only 
of the systematic works in most common use, and although Deles- 
sert’s Botanical Library, one of the richest known, is liberally open 
to all working botanists, the crossing half Paris every time a reference 
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