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(Travel and Descriptive)
WORKS PRIOR TO 1800 USEFUL FOR STUDIES IN MEXICAN BOTANY
Ida K. LANGMAN

THE following bibliography is part of a larger work now in preparation, to be entitled A Selected Guide to the Literature on Mexican Flowering Plants. This will list works in the fields of taxonomy (the identification and classification of plants), in economic botany (on uses of these plants by man), and in phytogeography (on the distribution of the plants and their ecology). It will include also works on the history of botany in Mexico, travel and descriptive works, vocabularies with names of Mexican plants, and botanical texts published in Mexico. The excerpt which follows lists travel and descriptive works, written before 1800, which include references to Mexican plants. Some are limited to the American area; others cover the entire world, as then known. Titles referring to the same period, but which are limited to Mexico, will be published, it is planned, in a later issue. Works whose primary emphasis is on natural history (Monardes, Hernández, etc.) are not included.

Most of the titles cited here are familiar to the student of Latin American history; many of them are classics in their field. But they are equally important to the botanist, for in them we find many of our first references to the plants of the New World in general, and of Mexico in particular. Yet most of these works were not cited by Nicolás León, in his Biblioteca Botánico-Mexicana.2 The works cited by León are preceded by an asterisk.

All of the works listed are available in the United States, and were seen, for the most part, in libraries in Philadelphia, New York and Washington. In most cases, the edition cited first is the one seen. Information on editions not seen has been added from various catalogues and bibliographies, especially the catalogue of the Library of Congress in Washington. This is abbreviated DLC. The letters RPJCB refer to the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island.

1 A preliminary listing of such works was published as "Ensayo para una bibliografía histórico-biográfica de la botánica en México," in the Memorias de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de México, 57: 373-429, 1955.
2 Nicolás León. Biblioteca Botánico-Mexicana. México, 1895. 372 p.