versity in respect of the specimens available for the monographists of the "Flora Brasiliensis" may be well illustrated by the contrast between the Aeanthaceæ and the Verbenaceæ, both of them worked up in Germany at about the same period,—the one with the assistance of almost every one of the collections above named; the other without any aid from the English, French, or Russian herbaria, nor yet, it would appear, from all the German ones. The difference in the use made of their materials by these two monographists is also great, but rather in an inverse than a direct ratio of their copiousness.
The present part has been wholly worked up, at Geneva, in the herbarium and library of De Candolle—the herbarium, one of the most extended and varied that exists, the botanical library, a very complete one in itself, and peculiarly adapted for practical use by the habit regularly adopted by the elder De Candolle, and continued by his son, of extracting from every new work received, references to genera newly established or modified, to be regularly entered into an alphabetical register kept for the purpose, and to species or structural observations entered on separate slips of paper, and duly distributed into the covers or cases kept for the different natural orders. Thus any monographist is at once directed to the whole literature relating to the order or genus he takes in hand. With such resources, and considerable assistance from other quarters, Alph. de Candolle was enabled to give a very complete monograph of the Santalaceæ and Myristicaceæ in the Prodomus, of which the articles on these families in the Brazilian Flora may be considered as an amplification in respect of the very few species indigenous to that country,—2 species of Thesium, and 26 of Myristica. To these the editor has added a digression on the use and cultivation of the nutmeg, and on the history—no very edifying one—of the almost abortive attempts hitherto made to introduce it into Brazil. The great bulk, however, of the part consists of the Apocynaceæ by Dr. T. Müller of Argovie, curator of the Candollean herbarium. This order, monographised for the Prodromus, in 1844, by Alph. De Candolle, is here worked up afresh, as far as regards the South American, and especially the Brazilian, species, after a comparison of the types of the Prodromus with the materials accumulated in the Candollean herbarium, or borrowed from Munich, Petersburgh, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, but without any aid from British collections, beyond a good duplicate set of Spruce's plants, in Martius's herbarium, and a tolerably fair one of Gardner's, in the Vienna Museum. The result is a detailed and apparently accurate description of 274 species, distributed into 32 genera, and illustrated by 53 plates. These plates are well engraved, and accompanied by ample dissections, sufficiently magnified to express clearly what they are intended to show, without that exaggeration of size which renders the plates in some of our modern works or memoirs almost unintelligible to unaccustomed eyes. The synonymy and stations are detailed after the general plan of the work; and, for some peculiarities in terminology—such as the substitution of "rostellum" for "radicula"—it is probable that here, as in other instances, the editor, not the author, is responsible.
