EASTERN PYRÉNÉES. Odon DEBEAUX (Agen 1826-1910), botanist, e - Lot 342

Lot n° 342
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EASTERN PYRÉNÉES. Odon DEBEAUX (Agen 1826-1910), botanist, e - Lot 342
EASTERN PYRÉNÉES. Odon DEBEAUX (Agen 1826-1910), botanist, explorer and military pharmacist, he made several botanical explorations in Algeria and China. 22 autograph letters signed to botanist Édouard Timbal-Lagrave (1819-1888), Toulouse, specialist in Pyrenean flora. 74 pp. in-8. Perpignan, 1872-1879. Very interesting correspondence devoted entirely to the flora of the Pyrénées-Orientales (Odon Debeaux spent several years in Perpignan, collected herbs throughout the department, and was particularly interested in roses. In 1878, he published Recherches sur la Flore des Pyrénées-Orientales: Matériaux pour servir à l'étude Monographique des Rosiers qui croissent dans les Pyrénées-Orientales). A fascinating correspondence, the interest of which can be gauged from the first letter, which we quote here, in part, as an example. "[...] I have just begun my herborizations in the Pyrénées Orientales, which still provide me with excellent species [...]. Around Perpignan, on the old ramparts of the city, I came across an antirrhinum which I found very difficult to determine. The description of a. siculum ucria in the Prodromus fits it perfectly. But comparing this species with a. siculum from Sicily or Spain, the Perpignan plant bears no resemblance. Nor is my plant the hispanicum of which I have specimens reported by Bourgeau, and in my opinion, it can only be a new species. This is also the opinion of M. Gandoger, to whom I sent a small sprig of my plant and who studied it with the types in the Jordan herbarium. I also found a Cyperus in abundance this August in the flooded meadows of the Tech at Amélie-les-Bains, which struck me as strange. At first glance, it might be mistaken for C. flaresceus, but its size, nearly 50 cent. in height, its smooth, cylindrical stems, and the shape of its flower heads and spittets, make it very different from C. flaresceus. M. Gandoyer, asked about the identity of this species, told me it belonged to Cyperys glaber Lin. He compared it with samples from Sicily and elsewhere, and named the Amélie-les-Bains plant Cyp. Glaber. When I consulted Lapeyrouse's Histoire des plantes des Pyrénées, I was astonished to see Cyperus glaber, a plant rejected from the French Flora by Loiseleur, and definitively by Duby, Grenier and Godron, reported in Prades on the banks of the lower river (the Tet). Lapeyrouse's assertion of this species as growing in Prades seems all the more accurate to me, as when I myself was herboring in Perpignan last August on the banks of the same river (the Tet), I found a single foot of the same Cyperus glaber [...] on the sands, laid dry in the middle of the riverbed [...]".
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