article, "The Musci and Hepaticae of the Pyrenees", published in 1849. Expedition to South America After Spruce proved his botanical skills in the Pyrenees, Hooker proposed a much more challenging expedition to Brazil. The prominent botanist George Bentham would act as broker and distributor of any specimens sent back to England. Despite his fragile health, Spruce accepted the proposal and spent a year at Kew becoming familiar with tropical botany. Spruce arrived at Pará on board the Britannia on 12 July 1849, and traveled up the Amazon River to Santarém where he first met two other young naturalists exploring the Amazon, Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates. Both subsequently well known for their work on natural selection, Wallace and Bates traveled along the tributaries of the Amazon, occasionally crossing paths with and sharing information with Spruce. Within the first two years of his expedition, Spruce had trekked along the full length of the river Trombetas to British Guiana, crossing over the Rio Negro to Manaos. The plants and objects collected by Spruce from 1849 to 1864 (mostly in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru) form an important botanical, historical and ethnological resource, and have been indexed at the New York Botanical Garden, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, at Trinity College Dublin, and at the University of Manchester. Towards the end of his expedition through South America, Spruce studied indigenous cultivation of cinchona in the Andes of Peru, then successfully exported seeds and young plants as requested by the government of India. The plant was cultivated to produce quinine, a drug used to prevent malaria. Later life By the time of his return to England in 1864, his health was broken and his savings lost to fraud. He spent the last 27 years of his life at Coneysthorpe, Yorkshire, near to where he was born. He received a small pension from the government and continued his botanical studies. He is buried in the churchyard of Terrington. Honours He was honoured in the naming of several taxa of plants; Sprucea (Dicranaceae), unaccepted, Sprucea 1853 (Rubiaceae), a synonym of Simira Sprucella 1886 (liverworts, Lepidoziaceae) Sprucella 1890 (Sapotaceae), synonym of Micropholis Spruceella 1900 (Rhachitheciaceae), synonym of Zanderia Spruceina 1903 (Lepidoziaceae), unaccepted, Sprucina 1908 (Malpighiaceae), synonym of Jubelina Spruceanthus in 1934 (Lejeuneaceae) Spruceanthus 1936 (Flacourtiaceae), a synonym of Neosprucea Neosprucea 1938 (Salicaceae) Sprucidea 2017 (Lichen, Malmideaceae), Selected publications Spruce, Richard (1841). "Three Days on