The Physiographical Commission was established in 1865 following a request made by Franciszek Herbich in 1863. Since 1866, the Parliament of Galicia in Lwów (Lemberg) had granted the Commission yearly subsidies, then the Commission established its Botanical Section. When Poland regained independence in 1918, the Commission expanded its activities over the whole country and the research work was financed by the Polish Ministry of Religious Denominations and Public Enlightenment. The economic crisis in the early 1930s, however, stopped the subsidising. On 9th of July 1945, the Commission was dissolved by the Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Botanical studies were conducted by the Commission in accordance with a plan developed in 1866 by Prof. Ignacy Rafał Czerwiakowski. The plan comprised projects in: floristics, systematics, phytogeography, ecology. Each year special grants were allowed to enable a few botanists to perform field studies for several days. The remaining part of the country was to be explored by non-subsidised amateurs. The Physiographical Commission sponsored 470 research projects in the area of botany (carried out by 158 botanists). The results of these studies included at least 937 published works. Most of them, 357 publications, were related to floristics; and 173 publications – to systematics. The overall results of the studies financed by the Commission are impressive, especially when one considers how meagre those subsidies were. The herbaria collected at that time, together with the published academic works, document the Commission’s scientific achievements.