Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/360

350 they were given serious consideration by many archeologists of good standing. Dr. Palmer's researches, however, proved that the remains of ancient occupation of the region were in no way distinguishable from those of similar character in Arizona and New Mexico. The plates were undoubted forgeries.

In addition to his archeological explorations he assisted Dr. Parry, who accompanied him, in completing a collection of the spring-flowering plants of the region.

It was now decided to invade Mexico in prosecution of botanical and ethnological work, and plans were formulated by which Dr. Palmer and Dr. Parry were to go together. The expenses were to be borne by several institutions as well as by individual botanists, who were to receive sets of plants. The two collectors accordingly proceeded to the city of San Luis Potosi, going by sea to Veracruz, and thence by rail to the City of Mexico. After visiting the National Museum in that city they turned northward. Dr. Palmer stopping on the way at the city of Zacatecas and at Aguascalientes.

After making extensive collections in the mountains of San Luis Potoso, Dr. Parry fell ill and was obliged to return home. Dr. Palmer continued the work, and after collecting on the tableland and mountains, returned by way of Tampico, descending into the more tropical lowlands near the gulf coast, and greatly supplementing the collections made in the higher altitudes.

Sets of plants were sent to the various subscribers to the expedition, but the most complete set was sent by Dr. Parry to the Kew Herbarium, which caused not a little dissatisfaction among some of the American subscribers. The results of the expedition were for the most part embodied in the great work by Hemsley, the "Botany of the Biologia Centrali-Americana."

The latter part of the following year, 1879, Dr. Palmer made extensive collections in western Texas, and in 1880 he returned to Mexico to supplement his previous collections, exploring chiefly certain localities in the states of Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and a part of San Luis Potosi. He sent a nearly complete set of the plants collected at this time to Kew, and they too were included by Hemsley in the "Biologia." A more complete set went to the herbarium at Cambridge, Mass., and were the basis of two papers published by Sereno Watson, in Volumes 17 and 18 of the Proceedings of the American Academy, in which a complete list of the plants collected by Parry and Palmer in 1878 and by Palmer in 1879 and 1880 was given.

The archeologists at Cambridge and in the Bureau of Ethnology becoming interested in the relationship between the aboriginal inhabitants of the tablelands of Mexico and of the great region of the Mississippi Valley, Dr. Palmer was engaged to make researches. Accordingly