Page:TASJ-1-1-2.djvu/377

 ago, that these works can have no interest for the European student of botany. Inouma, in writing the Soo mokou zoussets, proved incontestably that he understood the use of the magnifier and the scalpel, in contradiction to the malevolent assertions contained in an article published by the Association Scientifique, (Bulletin Hebdomadaire 1873, p. 229.) The anonymous author of this article has long ago received interesting botanical collections from Japan, with figures of plants, drawn by native artists, with enlarged anatomical details. There is still much to be gained from these works by those who desire to study thoroughly the flora of Japan.

Thunberg, in his Flora, does not mention much more than 1,050 species of phanerogamous and cryptogamous plants, if the species called in to do double duty are subtracted. Until the researches of Siebold and Buerger, our knowledge of Japanese plants remained stationary, and it is only since 1843, the date at which Zuccarini studied, and published an account of the plants collected by the Dutch botanists, that rapid steps were made in the progressive enumeration of them.

First, there were (in 1855) the American researches under Perry and John Rodgers, which furnished a considerable amount of materials chiefly drawn from the island of Yezo, the vegetation of which was thus for the first time made known with something like completeness. The botanical collections made in Japan were published almost immediately after this by Mr. Asa Gray.

A few years later William Hooker gave, in the work of Mr. Pemberton Hodgson on Japan, a list of 1700 phanerogamic and cryptogamic species, compiled from the descriptions of herbaries collected by Messrs. Alcock, Hodgson, Wilford and Oldham.

The publications of Mr. Asa Gray and of Sir Wm. Hooker at last decided the Dutch botanists to unite in a work upon the rich materials which their herbaries embraced, and M. Miquel, whose recent loss science now deplores, produced successively in the Annals of the Leyden Museum his Prolusio Floræ Japonicæ; next,