REVIEW 
LICHENS. By Annie Lorrain Smith, F.L.S., Acting- Assistant, Botanical 
Department, British Museum. Pp. xxviii + 464, with 135 figures in the 
text. Cambridge: at the University Press, 1921. Price: 55s. net. 
Although a few lichens from the Cape of Good Hope were described by 
pre-Linnean botanists, and three or four by Linnaeus himself, or by his son, 
the first important account of the Cape lichens is that given by Carl Thunberg 
in his Prodromus (Pars posterior, 1800). 
The list of species is a short one and the descriptions are in the brief style 
of that day. A fuller account of the same thirty-nine species is, however, given 
in Thunberg’s Flora Capensis of 1823 (Edition Schultes), where the localities 
from which Thunberg’s specimens were obtained are mentioned. 
A striking feature of this list is that it contains a number of endemic 
species which still remain amongst the most interesting members of the South 
African lichen flora; although since Thunberg’s day our knowledge has been 
very considerably extended. 
Of the botanists of a later date who have collected lichens in South Africa, 
perhaps no one was more enthusiastic than the late Professor MacOwan. 
Though not himself a lichenologist, he collected a large number of new species 
which he forwarded to Europe, where they were subsequently described, for 
the most part by continental botanists. 
Unfortunately for the South African lichenologist, scarcely a trace of all 
this work is to be found in any South African museum ; the type specimens are 
scattered through the European herbaria, and the duplicates are mostly in 
private hands. 
Before any complete account of the South African lichen flora can be given, 
the records of over one hundred and twenty years’ work must be correlated : 
a task presenting obvious difficulties for reasons already stated. 
What is required before much further progress can be made is the establish- 
ment of collections of lichens in the larger herbaria, and only in this way will 
the material for a monographic account of South African lichens again become 
available. 
It is in this connection that Miss Lorrain Smith s work will be oi a ei \ 
considerable value to the South African collector and student of lichens, as, 
since the publication of Schneider’s Text Book of General Lichenology in 1897, 
no other work has appeared giving an account of the group in the English 
language. 
