Abstract
It is surprising that a genus of plants so striking in aspect, so distinct in the shape of its fruit, and so widely spread asJulianiais in Mexico, should have entirely escaped observation by all the earlier European travellers in that country. Francisco Hernandez, Physician to Philip II of Spain, was the first European to investigate the Flora of Mexico, where he spent six years (1571-1577), chiefly in the State of Mexico. He laboured most assiduously, especially in medical botany, but his elaborate descriptive and illustrative works on the subject, which were not published until after his death, contain no mention of a plant or product bearing the vernacular name generally applied toJuliania. Nor does this name appear in any of the posthumous botanical works of Cervantes, or in those of Mociño and Sessé, and it has not been found in the writings of any of the minor writers on Mexican botany of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. C. J. W. Schiede, M. D., who accompanied Ferdinand Deppe on a botanical expedition to Mexico in 1828, was apparently the first to send dried specimens to Europe of one of the species ofJuliania. Sets of their joint collections exist in the Herbaria of Kew, the British Museum, Berlin, Vienna, Halle, and probably in those of some other institutions; but it seems highly probable that the specimens ofJulianiawere collected by Schiede on some subsequent excursion, because the narrative of his journeys with Deppe does not cover any part of the country in which the genus is known to be represented.