The Botany of Iceland - 01.12.1942, Page 10

8
JOHS. GRONTVED
af Videnskabernes Sælskab i Kiobcnhavn”. The floristic contributions
are to be found scattered in the text, and no general view of the plants
collected or observed is given. A total of some hundred and fifty species
is mentioned of which nearly 130 are Phanerogams, while the rest are
Vascular Cryptogams. In an appended list “Flora Islandica” are
enumerated the plants collected or observed by the Danish botanist J. G.
König who in the years 1764—65 made botanical investigations in Ice-
land. This list was written by another Danish botanist, Johan Zoega, who
took it from a publication by Otto Friederich Miiller, in Nova Acta
Curios. IV, 1770. Miiller’s list contained about 550 species of which
309 are Phanerogams, 24 are Vascular Cryptogams, and 210 other
Cryptogams (Mosses, Lichens, Algae and Fungi). O. F. Miiller’s paper
has the title “Enumeratio Stirpium in Islandia sponte crescentium”.
Several books on the nature of Iceland were written in the eighteenth
century but mostly in a more popular form. In 1766—67 the Danish
botanist Christen Friis Rottböll published a paper with the title “Af-
handling om en Deel enten gandske nye eller vel forhen bekiendte, men
dog for os rare Planter, som i Island og Gronland ere fundne, tilligemed
en kort Indledning om Urtelærens Tilstand i Dannemark” [Treatise
on some plants either quite new or, though known before, yet rare to us,
which are found in Iceland or Greenland, together with a short in-
troduction conceming the state of botanical knowledge in Denmark]
Kj’obenhavnske Vidensk. Selsk. Skrifter, Bd. X, 1766—67. This paper
may be looked upon as one of the first scientific works on the Icelandic
flora.
In the year 1786 Nicolai Mohr published a book under the title
“Forsog til en Islandsk Naturhistorie” [Attempt at an Icelandic Natural
History]. In Mohr’s work there is usually no description of the plant
in question but as a rule the habitat and the time of flowering are men-
tioned, in so far as Mohr had any knowledge of them. The plant-names
are given in Latin, Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian.
In 1809 the famous English botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker
visited Iceland and collected plants, and in 1813 he published a paper
“Joumal of a tour in Iceland in the summer 1809”. The list of Icelandic
plants in this paper is, however, mainly based upon Zoega’s above-men-
tioned enumeration, on Mohr’s Natural History of Iceland, and on the
plants seen by Hooker in a collection made by the Icelandic District
Physician Sveinn Pálsson. The plants gathcred by Hooker himself were
all destroyed when the ship by which they were sent from Iceland to
England caught fire. Some of the species Hooker has entered in his