OPTIMA Newsletter 38

among them, such as Odoardo Beccari,
Achille Terracciano, Adriano Fiori and Emilio
Chiovenda. Mapped itineraries have been
prepared for each expedition, and many interesting
archival documents, including photographs,
are reproduced, complemented
with modern colour photographs by the second
author.
W.G.
Herbaria and Libraries
131. 130BLuis VILLAR (ed.) – Flora medicinal
del Alto Gallego (Pirineo Aragonés).
Herbario de D. Vicente Latorre (1823-
1888) farmacéutico de Larrés (Huesca),
conservado en Jerez (Cádiz). – Amigos
de Serrablo, Huesca, 2006 (ISBN 978-
84-611-5132-5). 259 + [12] pages, 50
black-and-white figures, 30 colour photographs;
laminated cover.
When in 1999 Luis Villar was shown
the autographic inventory of Vicente Latorre’s
herbarium, faithfully kept by his
grandniece, Latorre’s name was all but forgotten,
and nothing was known of the plants
he had collected. He had been a pharmacist,
born in Larrés where he later practised, keen
connoisseur of the flora of the valleys and
mountains of his surroundings, the Pyrenees
of Upper Aragon. He is known to have sent
plant collections to Texidor and other correspondents
of his, in Madrid and Barcelona,
but the fate of these materials is unknown.
Stimulated by the quality of the said inventory,
Villar was able to ferret out the
whereabouts of the corresponding herbarium,
in as unlikely a place as the college “Padre
Luis Coloma” in Jerez de la Frontera, a provincial
town in southern Spain. It had been
donated by Latorre to the institution then
directed by his brother, and where his sons
were being educated. It was well attended to
there as the “collection from the north”, the
name of its originator having long been lost.
Publications
The manuscript consists of the transcripts
of the label texts, copied by Latorre
before he donated his herbarium, with his
subsequent annotations, e.g. additional localities.
Latorre being a pharmacist, this is
primarily but by no means exclusively a
pharmaceutical herbarium, i.e., the medicinal
properties of the plants, when known,
were carefully noted. It was conceived for
the purpose of demonstration, which means
that each species is represented once, with
mention of its known occurrences or local
distribution, properties, abundance, etc. The
manuscript is here published in full, in transcript,
with Villar’s frequent annotations.
Introductory chapters, by various authors,
include in much more detail the story just
told, and other background information.
The book is embellished by Julio
Gavín’s drawings of local architecture and
countryside, Marcel Saule’s plant portraits,
and Javier Ara’s photographs of the scenery
of Latorre’s homeland and some of the
plants he was familiar with.
W.G.
132. 131BPiero CUCCUINI & Chiara NEPI – The
Palms of Odoardo Beccari. [Quad.
Bot. Amb. Appl. (ISSN [1121-3752]),
17(1).] – Orto Botanico, Università degli
Studi di Palermo, 2006. 251 pages,
23 figures (photographs and facsimiles),
partly in colour, handwriting samples
from 133 specimens; paper.
The palm material of two “closed” collections,
kept separate in the Florence Herbarium
(FI), is treated in this inventory built
on downloads from the corresponding label
information database. The first is Odoardo
Beccari’s Malesian Herbarium (Erbario della
Malesia), in which there are 405 palm accessions,
mostly collected by Beccari himself.
This collection, acquired in 1879. is stored
in the same room as the Webb Herbarium
(FI-W) and is complemented by 28 separately
kept carpological specimens. The second
consists of palms alone, and is known as
2009 OPTIMA Newsletter No. 38 (69)