By Neus Ibáñez, Museu Ciencies Naturals Barcelona (Institut Botanic de Barcelona)
Eugene Louis Honoré Monguillon (1865-1940) (Figure 1) was a French teacher and botanist who worked at various public schools in the department of Sarthe. After 1923, he retired at Le Mans (France). He published the “Catalogue descriptive des lichens du department de la Sarthe” (Le Mans, 1901), among other important publications. He described new species and varieties of mosses and lichens (i.e. Sticta plumbea Mong. and Bacidia arceutina var. punctiformis Mong.) (Figure 2) as a part of making 14 recombination of the names of lichens.


His herbarium (Figure 3) is conserved in Le musée Vert in Le Mans. It includes 17,150 specimens of mosses and lichens with several dozens of types with all data computerized. The collection conserved specimens dated from 1811 to 1939 and collected from France, Europe and the rest of the world. This collection has been formed by exchanges with more than hundred French and European botanists, and it represents an interesting network of circulations in the “provinces”. E. Monguillon made the donation of his herbarium to the Société d’Agriculture, Sciences et Arts de la Sarthe in 1928 and 1929, according to the catalogue conserved in Le musée Vert (Figure 4). The main collection is conserved in this museum, but there are other specimens of E. Monguillon conserved in P (Paris herbarium), COLO (Colorado University of Colorado Museum of Natural History), BR (Meise Botanic Garden), BC (Botanic Institute of Barcelona) and DBN (National Botanic Garden Irland), among others.


The other botanist studied in our research is Longí Navàs i Ferré (1858-1938) (figure 5). He was one of the most prominent entomologists of the first third of the twentieth century: a naturalist, botanist, priest and Jesuit teacher. He was a very active scientist and disseminator; he described more than 3,300 new taxa, between genera, species and varieties, almost 2,200 correspond to the order of neuropterans. He was professor at Colegio del Salvador in Zaragoza (Spain), where he was in charge of the museum of natural history of this school. He made different herbaria of lichens and in 1902 founded the Sociedad Aragonesa de Ciencias Naturales and organized the first congress of naturalists in Zaragoza (1908). The most of the specimens can be found in Colegio del Salvador in Zaragoza, and also in the Museum of Natural Sciences of Barcelona, British Museum in London, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, museums in Brussels, Tervuren (Belgium), Turin (Italy) and Tucumán (Argentina). He donated his herbarium, the same as E. Monguillon, to an academy of sciences, in this case, la Real Academia de Ciencias y Artes de Barcelona in 1896 (figure 6). Nowadays, these 135 specimens are conserved in Botanic Institute of Barcelona.


About the specimens exchanged between these two botanists, we have studied 22 specimens collected by Longi Navas conserved in herbarium E. Monguillon from Saragossa, Madrid, Olot, Gipuzkoa, Castellon, La Rioja, Tenerife, La Palma and El Hierro (figure 7) and 4 specimens conserved in Botanic Institute of Barcelona (BC herbarium), all belonging to the exsiccata Colegio del Salvador-Zaragoza with exactly the same label that those conserved in Monguillon herbarium (figure 8).


We also have studied the specimens from Spain and/or collected by Spanish botanist conserved in E. Monguillon herbarium (100 specimens). Among these specimens we have found three types (a type sheet means that a new species was described on base of this specimen), that are currently being studied by our team for typification and publication in a scientific journal. The most interesting thing about these specimens are that from Olot (Catalonia) from volcanic zone, where new species were described in that time, and where the knowledge for volcanoes and by such phenomena increase in that century.
A part of these, E. Monguillon exchanged specimens with Ramon Bolos i Saderra (1852-1914), grandchild of Francesc Xavier Bolos i Germà (1773-1844), a naturalist who took an important part in the discovery of the Garrotxa volcanoes (an isolated region in Catalonia at that time), who published a description in Noticia de los extinguidos volcanes de la villa de Olot (first edition, 1820; second edition, enlarged, 1841). (Figure 9). After the study of this specimen, we have recognized the authorship thanks to the handwriting of the label.

All these results show us that local herbaria made in provinces, by such amateur botanists like E. Monguillon or Longí Navas, two regional teachers, can become of great interest to the scientific community and to the history of science at the European level and explain how the exchanges took place at that time.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Nathalie Richard (May 2, 2022). How two amateur botanists from peripheries assembled important herbaria from different parts of Europe. SciCoMove — Scientific Collections on the Move. Retrieved March 20, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/twsi