Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/765

Rh scientific work was the issuing of sets of specimens, mounted on leaves with printed labels, and bound into a volume having a title-page, index, etc. Specimens had accompanied Mr. Sullivant's text in the Musci Allghanienses, and now, from the ample stores collected by him and Lesquereux, or otherwise acquired, fifty-six sets of about three hundred and sixty species each were made up, and all, except a few copies for gratuitous distribution, were placed on sale at less than cost, for the benefit of his esteemed associate. The title of the volume was Musci Boreali Americani quorum specimina exsiccati ediderunt W. S. Sullivant et L. Lesquereux; 1856. The value of the work insured the speedy sale of the edition. A similar but larger collection, containing between five and six hundred species, many of them recently gathered in California by Dr. Bolander, was issued in 1865. The sets were disposed of with the same unequaled liberality as before displayed. Still later, Mr. Sullivant aided his friend Mr. Austin both in the study of his material and in the publication of his Musci Appalachiani.

In his Musci Cubenses, which appeared in 1861, Mr. Sullivant named the species of Charles Wright's earlier acquisitions in Cuba and described the new ones. These mosses were also distributed in sets by the collector. His researches upon later and more extensive collections by Mr. Wright, in which many new species were indicated, were left in the form of notes and pencil sketches at his death. The same is true of an earlier collection, made by Fendler in Venezuela.

Mr. Sullivant was several times called upon to work up the mosses gathered by Government exploring expeditions. Thus the Bryology of Rodgers's United States North Pacific Exploring Expedition was early prepared for publication by him in the most elaborate manner. But, from causes over which he had no control, it has never been published, although brief characters of the principal new species have seen the light. The fact that Sullivant's exquisite drawings of these species were not promptly engraved and given to the scientific world is especially to be regretted.

In the case of the South Pacific Exploring Expedition, under Commodore Wilkes, the volume on the mosses was not published in his lifetime, but Mr. Sullivant issued a separate edition of his portion of it in 1859. It forms a sumptuous imperial folio, the letterpress having been made up into large pages, and printed on paper matching that used for the twenty-six plates. The fourth volume of the Pacific Railroad Reports contains Sullivant's descriptions of the mosses collected in Whipple's Exploration, occupying about a dozen pages, and accompanied by ten admirable plates of new species.