Frederick Du Cane Godman
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 98
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1870 edition. Excerpt: ... botany of the azores. By H. C. Watson. I. botanical literature, &c. Passing over the earlier records of individual plants, chiefly collected by Masson, the first Flora Azorica bears the date of 1844. Dr. Mauritz Seubert was the author, and also the illustrator by his own pencil, of that valuable contribution to our stock of Local Floras. His work was based chiefly on collections made in the Azore Isles by C. F. Hochstetter in 1838. By a reference given in the preface to the Flora, it appears that a list of the plants had been published the preceding year in Wiegmann's Archiv fur Naturgeschichte, ix. Some few other species are also taken into the Flora from books previously published. Dr. Seubert's volume still remains the only real Flora of the Isles; it is a full enumeration of the species, so far as known to the author, with occasional remarks, diagnostic characters of the new species being introduced, and several of them being illustrated by characteristic plates. The chief defect of that Flora now is, that later researches have rendered it a very incomplete enumeration of the plants actually found in the Isles; so that a copious supplement would now be needful to bring it up to presently existent knowledge of Azore botany. Some minor defects may also be mentioned by way of i caution. Dr. Seubcrt was placed under the inconvenience and great disadvantage of writing the Flora of a country which he had not seen. Thus his work is truly more a botanical account of dried specimens from the Azore Isles than a proper Flora of those isles; and perhaps it would have been better had he even more strictly limited himself to such an account, avoiding guesses that might prove only erroneous records. For instance, he gives alleged ranges of...