Species Mairia microcephala

For Louis Maire (f 1815–1833), Prussian plant collector. He served in the Napoleonic Wars with Johannes Ludwig Leopold Mund (Mundia q.v.) and Peter Jonas Bergius (Bergia q.v.). After training as a gardener, he was sent to the Cape with Mund by the Berlin Museum to collect plants and natural history specimens. At least two large consignments were sent to Europe, but their productivity slackened, and Berlin recalled them. They ignored the order. Mund became a surveyor, and Maire apparently set up as a doctor. In 1833 the French Protestant missionary Eugene Casalis met with a ‘Dr Lemaire’, possibly the same man, at Graaff-Reinet, who said he had been a surgeon in the Prussian army when they entered Paris in 1815 and that afterward the King of Prussia had dispatched him on a botanical expedition to South Africa.