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.

  • Spruce, Richard, 1817-1893.
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

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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    have thus come into my hands, as Mr. Mitten’s executor. The series appears to be complete from August 25, 1843, to August 5, 1848—66 in all. This last letter, like the great majority of the series, is about details in the structure and classification of Mosses and Hepaticse, but a postscript states that, as he is soon coming to London to superintend the sale by auction of the late Dr. Taylor’s herbarium, he hopes to meet Mr. Borrer. The letters are, however, full of interest, and enable me both to give a connected sketch of his occupations after giving up scholastic work, and also, by suitable extracts, to give some idea of his character and opinions. More than thirty years later, when describing a new genus of Amazonian Hepaticce in the Journal of Botany, and noticing that a British species (Odontochisma Sphagni) grows with it though not on a Sphagnum, he gives us in a footnote the following very interesting bit of nature-study combined with archaeology, which is so characteristic that I will here quote it nearly entire, especially as it refers to one of his excursions with Mr. Borrer. He writes :— “ On our own moors I have far oftener seen Odontoschisma Sphagni growing on Leucobryum glaucum than on Sphagna. Now that the steam-plough is fast obliterating the small remnant of moors in the Vale of York, it is worth while recording something about the Leucobryum, as seen on Strensall Moor, five to six miles north of York. There it forms immense rounded hassocks, some of which in my youth were as much as three feet high; and although the ground whereon they grew is now drained and ploughed out, I am told that on another part of the moor there are still left a few hassocks about two feet high. When the late Mr. Wilson first saw them, thirty years ago, he took them at a distance for sheep ; as he approached them he changed his mind for haycocks ; but when he actually came up and saw what they were he was astonished, and declared he had never seen such gigantic moss-tufts elsewhere. During seven consecutive years that I saw them frequently, I could observe no sensible increase in height. The very slight annual outgrowth of the marginal branches is comparable to the outermost twigs of an old tree, and is almost or quite counterbalanced by the soft, imperfectly elastic mass incessantly decaying and settling down at the base ; so that these tufts of Leucobryum may well be almost as secular as our Oaks or Elms; and some of them might even be coming into existence, if not so far back as when the warders of Bootham Bar and Monk Bar (the northern entrances to York) used to hear the wolves howling beneath their feet on the bleak winter nights, at