Note 31 — EVENTS IN FILIPINAS, 1801–1840

Montero y Vidal says (iii, p. 21): “On March 21, 1840, the Economic Society of Friends of the Country made a grant of 500 pesos to Father Blanco for the expenses of printing and publishing the Flora which bears his name.” In 1845 a second edition appeared, corrected and enlarged by the author himself; and a third edition was issued (1877–80) at the cost of the Augustinian order. This last was in four volumes, a limited edition, with an atlas (in two volumes) containing 478 colored plates; it also included a previously unpublished MS. on Philippine botany, written late in the sixteenth century, and an appendix prepared by the editors of Blanco (Fathers Andrés Naves and Celestino Fernández-Villar) in which they endeavored to coördinate Blanco’s species with those of other authors and to enumerate all the species of Philippine plants then known. See an account of Blanco’s work and that of his later editors, with estimate of the scientific value of both, in Review of the Identifications of Species Described in Blanco’s “Flora” (Manila, 1905), by Elmer D. Merrill, botanist of the Bureau of Government Laboratories at Manila. ↑