Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/221

Rh containing the types of his work on cacti, Agave, Cuscuta, Yucca, conifers, and other groups of plants on which he was a recognized authority, and in which he described many species, will long form the most essential resource of students of these plants, for clearing up difficulties in their interpretation. Some years since, one of the young men at the garden was struck by the frequent coincidence of a certain handwriting with species of grasses known to have been collected by Haenke, and to have served for studies by Presl; and investigation showed that the writing was really Presl's, and that in the Bernhardi herbarium, which contains many valuable—but unfortunately inadequately labeled—specimens, was a nearly full set of this important collection of Haenke the grasses of which were subsequently studied in detail by Professor Lamson-Scribner, to the elucidation of a number of questions concerning the grasses of the United States, which could be answered only by recourse to the original specimens on which Presl's species rested.

It would be even more tiresome to give a minute analysis of the contents of the herbarium than of the library. Suffice it to say that in addition to the Engelmann and Bernhardi herbaria, it contains the herbarium of Sturtevant—purchased after his death from an old friend to. whom he had given it, but who desired it to be placed with the other material serving as a record of his friend's work; a pre-Linnean collection formed by the German botanists, Ludwig and Boehmer, on which a Prussian flora was based long since; the cryptogamic herbarium of the director of the garden; a very large and full collection of the plants of Alaska, made on the Harriman Alaska Expedition, and containing, through the Bernhardi herbarium, representatives of a considerable number of the species collected by the early Russian explorers; a good representation of the plants of the West Indies, collected by a former assistant at the institution, who was sent into the Caribbean region on a collecting trip; one of the fullest representations of plants from the Azores, in which, and to a smaller extent in Madeira, the director has spent some time; a very full representation of the flora of Missouri, in which the Biehl collection and a set of specimens many years since put up by Professor G. C. Broadhead, and on which his early notes on the plants of the state rest, are of especial interest; and probably the fullest set of Chinese plants that has yet come to this country. All the more important current collections of the plants of North America, and many of those from foreign lands, have been bought as they have been offered for sale. Not long before his death, Dr. Chapman, long the only authority on the flora of our southern states, asked the director to visit him, in order that arrangements might be made for the ultimate