Volume 3

Notes of a botanist on the Amazon & Andes : being records of travel on the Amazon and its tributaries, the Trombetas, Rio Negro, Uaupés, Casiquiari, Pacimoni, Huallaga and Pastasa; as also to the cataracts of the Orinoco, along the eastern side of the Andes of Peru and Ecuador, and the shores of the Pacific, during the years 1849-1864 / by Richard Spruce ; edited and condensed by Alfred Russel Wallace ; with a biographical introduction, portrait, seventy-one illustrations and seven maps.

Richard Spruce

Date:: 1908

Credit: Notes of a botanist on the Amazon & Andes : being records of travel on the Amazon and its tributaries, the Trombetas, Rio Negro, Uaupés, Casiquiari, Pacimoni, Huallaga and Pastasa; as also to the cataracts of the Orinoco, along the eastern side of the Andes of Peru and Ecuador, and the shores of the Pacific, during the years 1849-1864 / by Richard Spruce ; edited and condensed by Alfred Russel Wallace ; with a biographical introduction, portrait, seventy-one illustrations and seven maps. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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just resumed microscopic work again, for irr the very cold weather I had to give it up. But I have gone completely through all my South American Hepaticae, and have selected and classified type- specimens for ulterior analysis. In Lejeunea alone—in its widest sense, that is, including Phragmicoma, etc.—I have no fewer than 460 ‘ forms.’ I have also gone over all my old European her¬ barium and have brushed away the excreta of destructive insects, so that (except to myself) the signs of their ravages are now scarcely apparent.” Again in October 1873 : “I hammer away, as well as I can, at Lejeuneas and their relatives. It serves to beguile pain; whether it will ever be completed, time will show.” More than a year later, in December 1874, he writes: “My work is now limited to chewing the cud of partially digested obser¬ vations made during the past summer”—indicating under what difficulties and painful conditions he continued to labour at the great work (and enjoyment) of his life—the minute and exhaus¬ tive study of the Hepaticae. It was about this time that his long correspondence with Mr. Daniel Hanbury was brought to a close by the lamented death of his friend. The following extracts from some of Spruce’s latest letters to him are of general interest:— Richard Spruce to Da?iiel Hanbury “Welburn, Feb. 10, 1873.” [In reply, apparently, to some depreciatory remarks upon his favourite Hepatics, Spruce writes as follows :—] “The Hepaticae are by no means a ‘little family.’ They are so abundant and beautiful in the tropics, and in the Southern Hemisphere generally, that I think no botanist could resist the temptation to gather them. In equatorial plains, one set creeps over the living leaves of bushes and ferns, and clothes them with a delicate tracery of silvery-green, golden, or red-brown ; and another set, along with mosses, invests the fallen trunks of old trees. In the Andes they sometimes hang from the branches of trees in masses that you could not embrace with your arms. I have some species with a stem half a yard long, and others so minute that six of them grow and fruit on a single leaflet of an Acrostichum. Then, as to number and variety, I suppose that the working up of my South American Hepaticae may entail equal labour to that of monographing the world’s Rubiaceae. In the largest genus, Lejeunea, I have not merely thousands of specimens, but thousands of papers covered with specimens ; and

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