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108 The Spanish Scientific Commission to the Pacific 1863-1866. The Scientific Commission to the Pacific was the most important scientific enterprise of 19th century Spain. In the spring of 1862, the Ministry of Development decided to add a scientific team to a naval squadron that the government of General O’Donnell sent to America as part of its Pan-Hispanic politics. The group of naturalist travelers was formed by six professors of the Natural Science Museum of Madrid and two assistants: a taxidermist and an illustrator, and photographer. Their mission was to form scientific collections that would enrich the Spanish museums and contribute to develop the program of acclimatization of exotic plants and animals that would be useful for the Spanish economy. The expedition visited Brazil, Uruguay and Chile, before turning northwards towards Ecuador, Central America and California, returning to Spain at the end of 1865. Only a small part of the collections of the Commission have been studied and we cannot confirm the collection of orchid specimens by its members. The herbarium of Juan Isern y Batlló (1821-1866), the Commission’s botanist, was studied in part by José Cuatrecasas and awaits further research at the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid. Lindley and Reichenbach: change of the guard “Central America has, according to our present knowledge, one of the richest orchid floras. Fortune not only smiled at me bringing into my hands many of the best collections of this region, richer than Lindley ever obtained them, but I can trust in ... many more shipments from there.” H. G. Reichenbach (1866, introduction) “[...] The British horticulturist and botanist John Lindley (1799-1865) is the perfect example of high society’s passion for botany in the 1800s” (Ceulemans et al., 2006: 107). Lindley was the most important orchidologist in the first half of the XIX century and described the majority of orchids that were discovered in Central America. His close relation with the Botanical Gardens at Kew, during a time when British power dominated the five continents, brought into his hands, for identification, new species from all over the LANKESTERIANA LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009. world. However, during the first years of the second half of the century, a new star arose in the name of Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach (1824-1889) (Fig. 38D), who had published in 1852 his dissertation on the structure of the pollen masses in orchids and had started, in 1854, the publication of his Xenia Orchidaceae, which he would complete in 1883. Son of the famous botanist Heinrich Gottlieb Reichenbach, Reichenbach filius soon began to be recognized as Lindley’s protégé, being first his assistant and later his competitor in the identification of new species. Nonetheless, they were bound by a close friendship that lasted until Lindley’s death. Reichenbach’s evolution as an orchid expert is evident if we observe chronologically the collections which were studied between 1830 and 1860 31 .The majority of the Central American specimens of Loddiges, Cuming, Skinner, Hartweg, Hinds, Sinclair and Barclay were identified by Lindley. The descriptions of the new species discovered by Schiede, Deppe and Linden are divided between Lindley and Reichenbach. However, beginning with Seemann, and continuing with Friedrichsthal, Warscewicz, Liebmann, Oersted, Behr, Duchassaing, Roezl, Hoffmann and Wendland, it is almost exclusively Reichenbach who studied and identified the Central American collections. Many of the new species were described by Reichenbach in his Contributions to the orchidology of Central America, published in Hamburg in 1866. When Lindley died in 1865, Reichenbach became the virtual dictator of orchidology, although he was not immune from criticism. The botanist George Bentham criticized his determinations for ignoring structural characteristics other than those of the flower and an obituary in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society later referred to the ‘many puzzles in his descriptions, which of late years had assumed an esoteric character’ (Elliot, 1994: 441). When Reichenbach died in 1889, he left his enormous herbarium, including all the material that had been contributed by other botanists during his life, to the Imperial Museum of Vienna. It contained more than 700,000 specimens, of which some 52,000 where orchids. The sheets usually showed very rude but very characteristic drawings. Reichenbach’s will read textually: “My herbarium and my botanical library, 31 For chronological comparisons one must take into account that study and identification of species often took place two or three years after the date of collection, due to the length of the expeditions and the difficult conditions of travel.
ossenbaCh — Orchids and orchidology in Central America A B C Figure 38. A — Hermann Wendland (1825-1903). Courtesy of Rudolf Jenny. B — Carl Gustav Bernoulli (1834-1878). Courtesy of Rudolf Jenny. C — Stelis carioi Schltr. Illustration by Blanche Ames, courtesy of the Oakes Ames Orchid Herbarium, Harvard University. D — Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach (1824-1889), at age 38. Courtesy of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation. D 109 LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009.
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LANKESTERIANA 9(1-2): 1-268. 2009.
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In Belize, the Botanical Station wa
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despotism penetrated the social sec
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ut we believe that they resemble th
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Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (Gómez-Po
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