Wilhelm Georg Schimper probably collected more type specimens of Tropical African plants than any other botanist, with the possible exception of Welwitsch. Although he lived, in the comparatively healthy Ethiopian highlands, to a ripe old age, his work has suffered more than that of most scientists from wars. His possessions in Ethiopia, including plants and manuscripts, were looted and destroyed in 1855, he was imprisoned in 1867, many of his collections and perhaps manuscripts were destroyed in the bombardment of Strasbourg in 187o and the first set of many of his collections, which alone bore his careful and often copious field notes in full, was mostly destroyed in the bombing of Berlin in 1944. He thus published almost nothing himself and there is no full account of his life. To add to the obscurity Wilhelm Georg Schimper has often been confused with his better known botanical relatives, his uncle Wilhelm Phillip Schimper, the bryologist, Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper the plant geographer, W.P.S.'s son, and Karl Friedrich Schimper the plant morphologist, W.G.S.'s brother. For example the list of collectors whose plants are in the Kew Herbarium published in Bull. Misc. Inf. Kew 1901 : I-8o attributes W. G. Schimper's very numerous collections either to W. P. Schimper or simply to 'Schimper'. Several factors enhance the difficulty of localizing Schimper's specimens. His place names may not be found on any map and are often absent from duplicate specimens, though always present on the first set. His numbers, while valuable in citing a specimen, if accompanied by the year, are useless for establishing the sequence in which plants were collected, both because he started a new series of numbers every year or two and because he seems usually, perhaps always, to have sorted a collection into families before numbering it. His handwriting is always difficult and sometimes virtually illegible. The same name takes different forms according to the mother tongue (Amharic, Tigrinia or one of the Galla languages) of the local person using it, according to the speech habits (German, French, Italian or English) of the European recording it and according to whether it was obtained by writing down a spoken word or by transcription from written Amharic or Tigrinia. Schimper often supplied the vernacular name of a plant with the language concerned. These names may be taken for place names and the language Tigre or Agow for the name of the province. The institutions receiving or distributing Schimper's specimens in Europe often placed on the labels the date, or year, of reception or distribution. These dates or