Just finished Stefano Mancuso‘s slim, spirited, and delightful volume “The Incredible Journey of Plants.” Here’s a remarkable paragraph about the perseverance required for German-born botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius to finally have his 7-volume, 1,660-page life’s work published for our benefit, alas a half-century after his death:

Rumphius was one of botany’s true champions. During his sojourn in the Maluku Islands, he identified and described numerous vegetable species, previously unknown—a huge accomplishment that in Europe earned him the nickname “Plinio Indicus” (“Pliny of the Indies”), and all this despite a series of personal catastrophes. In 1670, at age forty-three, he became blind from glaucoma. In 1674, during an earthquake on Ambon, he lost his beloved wife, Suzanne (whose name he had given to an orchid), and a son. In 1687, a fire destroyed his library and most of his manuscripts and drawings. After years and years in which he managed to reconstruct his lost work, he sent it to Amsterdam to be published, but the ship was attacked and sunk by the French. Fortunately, he had kept a copy, and finally, in 1696, it arrived in Amsterdam. There, the Dutch East India Company decided it contained too much non-divulgeable information, and so it blocked publication of the work for almost fifty years. Rumphius died on Ambon in 1702. His Herbarium Amboinense was finally published between 1741 and 1750.