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HIS WRITINGS
143

London Journal of Botany and Kew Gardens Miscellany. 9 vols. 1849-57.

From this list it appears that throughout a long term of years, though under varying titles, the stream of information gathered chiefly through garden management was edited and published, taking the form of 28 volumes, with 556 plates.

The "Floristic" works of Sir William Hooker began with the second edition of Curtis's Flora Londinensis, in five folio volumes, upon which he worked from 1817 to 1828. He contributed a large proportion of the plates from his own drawings, while the descriptions throughout (excepting those of the plates on Algae and Fungi by R. K. Greville) were enlarged, and rewritten by him. He was in fact the real author of the work, which, however, was so badly edited—even the letter-press was not paged—that citation of it was impossible, and it never took its proper place as a scientific work. Sir Joseph Hooker points out that the second edition was not properly styled Flora Londinensis, since it included many species which are not indigenous anywhere near London. But these were the lapses of the editor, not of the author and artist. Minor works were the accounts of the plants collected on Parry's and Sabine's Arctic voyages (1823-28), but the Flora Boreali Americana was a more important undertaking. It appeared as two quarto volumes (1829-40), in which 2500 species were described with numerous illustrations. It was based on the collections of various travellers, and included ferns and their allies. In 1830 came the first edition of the British Flora, a work which was continued through eight editions, the last being in 1860, and it contained 1636 species. The botanical results of Beechey's voyage in the "Blossom" to the Behring Sea, the Pacific Ocean, and China were produced jointly with Dr Walker-Arnott in 1830-41, as a quarto volume, with descriptions of about 2700 species, and notable for the diversity of the floras included. In 1849 the Niger Flora appeared, dealing with the collections of Vogel on the Niger expedition of 1841. But the most remarkable of all these floristic works was the great series of the Icones Plantarum. It was initiated in 1837 for the illustration of New and rare plants selected from the Author's Herbarium,