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Georg Josef Camel (1661-1706) went to the Spanish colony of the Philippine Islands as a Jesuit lay brother in 1687, and he remained there until his death. Throughout his time in the Philippines, Camel collected examples of the flora and fauna, which he drew and described in detail. This paper offers an overview of his life, his publications and the Camel manuscripts, drawings and specimens that are preserved among the Sloane Manuscripts in the British Library and in the Sloane Herbarium at the Natural History Museum, London. It also discusses Camel's links and exchanges with scientifically minded plant collectors and botanists in London, Madras and Batavia. Among those with whom Camel corresponded were John Ray, James Petiver, and the Dutch physician Willem Ten Rhijne.

Joseph Banks possessed the greater part of the zoological specimens collected on James Cook's three voyages round the world (1768-1780). In early 1792, Banks divided his zoological collection between John Hunter and the British Museum. It is probable that those donations together comprised most of the zoological specimens then in the possession of Banks, including such bird specimens as remained of those that had been collected by himself and Daniel Solander on Cook's first voyage, and those that had been presented to him from Cook's second and third voyages. The bird specimens included in the Banks donations of 1792 became part of a series of transactions during the succeeding 53 years which involved the British Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and William Bullock. It is a great pity that, of the extensive collection of bird specimens from Cook's voyages once possessed by Banks, only two are known with any certainty to survive.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, lumbermen logged the virgin pine forests of northern Michigan. The assumption was that the "plow would follow the axe," and agriculture would dominate the region as it did in the southern half of the state. When farming did not quickly take root, William James Beal and Liberty Hyde Bailey led an expedition of scientists and journalists on a trip across northern Michigan in June 1888 to collect botanical samples, to find a site for a state forest reserve, and to recommend appropriate farming enterprises. This essay contends that without a key reforestation advocate in charles Garfield the explorers focused too much on the questions related to botany and agriculture.While agriculture would ultimately thrive in some parts of the cutover, much of the region was unsuitable for intensive farming. The failure of the scientists to convey these limits adequately in newspaper articles and subsequent reports allowed for their work to be used by agricultural boosters throughout the region. The result was a cycle of erosion, fire, and farm abandonment that proved to be a political problem in Michigan for the first three decades of the twentieth century.