(Source: Flora Malesiana ser. 1, 1: Cyclopaedia of collectors)

Vidal in Rev. Pl. Vasc. Filip., 13, speaks of finding at the Museo del Jardin botanico [MA], Madrid, 5 packets of Philippine plants collected in the years 1830 to 1835. In 1884 these specimens were evidently still undisturbed in their original packages.

The collector is unknown, but was probably some army or naval officer. According to Merrill (Bull. Philip. Bur. Agr. no 4, 1903 p. 33-34), Colmeiro credited the collection (400 nos) erroneously to Blanco & Llanos.

Part of it is collected on Mount Arayat in the Province of Pampanga (Luzon), in 1829; the first collection secured from one of the higher mountains!

(*) Anonymous collectors are numerous in the Malaysian collections. Many of them were officials whose names can only be traced with difficulty or not at all, and who, in all probability, often did not collect in the field themselves.

Some large collections were made by native collectors whose names are not noted (e.g. from Borneo). Further there are quite a number of totally anonymous collections, of which we have not the faintest idea who made them. The anonymous collections cannot be neglected; some are very large e.g. the ‘Native Collector(s)’ employed by the Bureau of Science in Borneo. Some are very important, and contained a lot of novelties, e.g. the grasses collected by veterinary surgeons in Soemba Isl. (L.S.I.). Sometimes duplicates were distributed of well-known collections with totally inadequate labels, specially of the old collections; these duplicates are now often ‘anonymous’. The anonymous collections have been annoying for the present compiler. They are here arranged geographically and chronologically.