Reviews

In 1902 Gresshoff edited, for the “Koloniaal Museum” at Haarlem, a folio memorial volume, “Rumphius Gedenkboek”, dedicated to the memory of that great pioneer in the East Malaysian tropics, Rumphius, at the occasion of the bicentenary of his death in Ambon, the Moluccas, where he lived from 1654 till his death in 1702. Notwithstanding many mishappenings he attained the ripe age of 75 years, a most unusual career for a pioneer in the tropics, and carried on, as a disinterested hobby, nay as a vocation, his studies of plants and animals. His observations, laid down in voluminous MSS, none of which was published during his life-time, are, besides being written in a most lively style, so accurate, that they still form a source of knowledge today. The 1902 Memorial Volume was partly in Dutch, partly in German, and is still a standard work, but it was not exhaustive. There were chapters devoted to an evaluation of the evertebrate animals described in Rumphius’s “Rariteitkamer”, but not of the other animals and there was no evaluation of the Herbarium Amboinense; in his attempt to re-collect Rumphian plants and make this account Boerlage even lost his life (1900).