Untitled - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

342 NOTES OF A BOTANIST CHAP,
which may be of value as showing why a man with
and who was
(apparently) such fine opportunities,
so interested in botany, yet did so little :
Jameson told me he had been to Banos only
once in his life, although he has been over forty
years in Ecuador. He would have liked to go
again to gather some of the Orchids I found on
Tunguragua, but could not spare either the time
or the money. Suppose he were to write to ask you
just to step over to the Shetland Islands and get him
a form of Stereocaulon paschale which grows there
you could do it more easily than he could go to
Banos and back. Yet Jameson is one of the most
amiable of men, an ardent collector (for other
people much the same as I have been), and a very
fair botanist and mineralogist. But what can a
poor fellow do who has had a drunken (and worse)
wife hanging on him for forty years, who burns his
dried plants, whenever she can get hold of them,
so that he can keep no herbarium, and who has
often had to struggle with absolute want ?
[This is the Dr. Jameson after whom was
named the beautiful greenhouse shrub Streptosolen
Jamesonii, as well as many other plants.
The remainder of this volume consists of extracts
from letters to Mr. H anbury, having special reference
to matters connected with his residence in the
Andes ; together with six essays on various subjects
relating to his travels, which have either been
hitherto unpublished or are almost unknown to
English readers. They have been condensed where
necessary, but are otherwise as Spruce left them.]
]