This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
48
BOTANY.

have been resorted to, to found a professorship, and augment the collections in the botanic garden of the Capital. Our indefatigable botanist, aided by the skilful draughtsman, Don Francisco Pulgar, is unceasingly occupied, and keeps up a constant communication between the mountains, Lima, and Madrid. The Flora of Peru, augmented by new and continual supplies, will be an eternal monument of the wisdom and magnificence of two sovereigns; a rich accumulation of the treasures of the vegetable kingdom; and the most authentic testimony to prove, that Peru does not abound less in exquisite plants, than in precious metals.

Let it not, however, be thought, that the inestimable collections we have cited, have already exhausted the productions of that nature. The unknown and rare plants which grow on the borders of the Andes, would of themselves form a catalogue. The want of tracks to penetrate into the spacious levels these mountains contain, and to examine the directions of the rivulets and streams by which they are intersected, is an insuperable obstacle to the exact inquiries which, it is trusted,


    pointed out the professors and men of science whom we have ascertained to have been in this kingdom, without noticing those who, in Europe or elsewhere, have treated the subject. We shall conclude by citing the distinguished personages by whom the science is protected, and whose names will be transmitted to posterity by the plants which have been dedicated to them. They are as follows: Father Francisco Gonzales Laguna, to whose care the foundation and direction of the botanical garden of Lima have been entrusted. Don Hypolito Ruiz has dedicated to him the Gonzaletia dependens, which inhabits the mountains. Doctor Cosme Bueno, principal cosmographer of Peru, to whom the same botanist has dedicated the Cosmea balsamifera, commonly called Limoncillo. And, lastly, Dodlor Gabriel Moreno, a physician of Lima, to whom M. Dombey has dedicated the Peruana-Morena, vulgarly called Rosario in the district of Chauchin, where it is indigenous.

will