The Herbarium as Manuscript

Iris specimens with painted additions in the Harder Herbarium at Oak Spring Garden Library.

The final library I visited on my recent tour (see earlier posts 1,2,3) is my absolute favorite, the Oak Spring Garden Library in Virginia.  It is the home of Rachel Mellon’s superb collection of plant-related books and art.  It is a beautiful space and all the people I know who are connected with it are absolutely wonderful, from the President of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation Peter Crane to its librarian Tony Willis, as well as Kimberley Fisher, Nancy Collins, and Danielle Eady.  They are all great—and the books are too.  On this visit I looked at an illustrated manuscript copy of Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur from about 1350 and a 1455 Italian herbal by an unknown artist.  It was a great experience to examine them, but for me, the real treasure in the collection is the Johannes Harder’s 1595 herbarium, which, oddly enough I did not examine on this trip.

I didn’t need to disturb what is a very fragile work because the library is in the process of digitizing its manuscripts, and though they aren’t available online yet, Peter Crane very kindly allowed me to have low resolution images to use for my research.  This is a great relief because I can examine the manuscript’s contents without disturbing its pages.  There’s a great deal to study here, even though most pages have little more than the Latin and German plant names, sometimes with Polish names added at a later date.  I fell in love with this because Harder added watercolor embellishments to most of its pages.  These range from painting-in missing petals to entire flowers, roots, and bulbs.  The most common addition is a clump of grass-covered earth to ground the stem.  His work is not unique.  There are twelve of his father Hieronymus’s herbaria in European institutions as well as one by his brother-in-law Johann Brehe (Skružná  et al., 2022) and at least one more by someone else from the same area in Germany (Dobras, 2013).  Hieronymus seems to have originated the style, and it became one of several early experiments in how best to preserve information about plants from storing illustrations and specimen together to creating nature prints. 

While this experiment didn’t catch on, it is nonetheless fascinating.  It also got me thinking about the herbarium not just as a document of botanical information or as an historical document, which it certainly is, or even as a piece of art, but also as a manuscript.  I am not the only one thinking this way.  Bettina Dietz, a researcher at the University of Erfurt in Germany has written an article on the herbarium as manuscript, in which she focuses not on the specimens themselves but on the written information on the sheets (Dietz, 2024).  After all most manuscripts are seen as written documents, and Dietz doesn’t consider these pages as an exception.  She examines the bound herbaria that the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646-1695) created during his years as a medical officer in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.  Two of the volumes have extensive notations by him and by later owners.  There is information on the indigenous language and its script as well as notes on the medicinal uses of the plants and their morphology.  Dietz does a textual analysis similar to what would be done on other manuscripts.  She argues that these writings tell a great deal about both the botanical knowledge and the linguistic skills of the authors.

When I saw her title I was expecting something a little different because for several years I too have been thinking about early herbaria as manuscripts, but from another perspective.  This occurred to me during covid when I read a blog post by a Dutch graduate student Suzette van Haaren who was researching the relationship between the digitized version and the physical one for among other manuscripts the Bury Bible at Cambridge University.  She was at Cambridge, but couldn’t access the “real” bible and wrote about how she navigated that divide.  This intrigued me, and since I had time to think and to explore manuscripts on the web I learned about how they are digitized.  It is a very different process than imaging specimens.  Because of the irregularity in the pages due to staining, warping, and different kinds of images, some with gold embellishments, each page requires individual attention.  Digitizing specimens was about getting good images of as many specimens as possible to the point that it could be done on an assembly line.  Digitizing manuscripts bordered on art and required a different set of skills that would apply to early bound herbaria as well. 

There are many other similarities between manuscripts and bound herbaria dealing not with the text or even with digitization, but with the very materiality to the sheets.  Study of this aspect can tell many stories.  The Harder herbarium pages are watermarked, and a librarian friend was able to trace the mark to a German papermaker of the era and working in an area close to where Harder lived.  The pencil lines on the left and right hand sides of each page suggest that Harder was knowingly imitating the structure of a manuscript’s border, as does the index that has each page divided into three columns with lines in red that also run across the top and bottom of the page.  Harder’s writing is calligraphic with carefully done capital letters, and the watercolor drawings are similar to those in early herbals.  I could go on about the feel of the paper and the look and feel of the well-warn binding with what are left of brass fittings.  It is in this physicality that digitized versions fail miserably, but I am still very grateful for them because how else would I have ever seen the great En Tibi herbarium in Leiden or Ulisse Aldrovandi’s in Bologna.

Note: I am very grateful to everyone at the Oak Spring Garden Library for making my visit so wonderful, as it always is.

References

Dietz, B. (2024). Herbaria as manuscripts: Philology, ethnobotany, and the textual–visual mesh of early modern botany. History of Science, 62(1), 3-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753231181285

Dobras, W. (2013). Hieronymus Harder und seine zwölf herbare. Montfort, 65(2), 121–152.

Skružná, J., Pokorná, A., Dobalová, S., & Strnadová, L. (2022). Hortus siccus (1595) of Johann Brehe of Überlingen from the Broumov Benedictine monastery, Czech Republic, re-discovered. Archives of Natural History, 49(2), 319–340. https://doi.org/10.3366/anh.2022.0794

The Library as Herbarium

Rare books and herbarium cabinets in the Special Collections vault at West Chester University.

The title of this post is meant to differentiate it from my last post, “Herbaria in Libraries,” which described bound herbaria kept in library special collections.  There are many of these, particularly in Europe where almost all of the oldest herbaria are found.  The case I want to describe here is different:  an entire herbarium now resides in the West Chester University Francis Harvey Green Library’s Special Collections vault.  It used to be housed in the biology department, but its only botanist was retiring, and the department could wanted to use the space for other purposes.  To anyone familiar with the history of herbaria, this is an all too common story, but here the outcome was not moving the collection to one or more other institutions as usually happens.

One of the reasons for this is that the herbarium, named after William Darlington (1782-1863), houses specimens that are among the oldest in the United States and are closely related to the West Chester area.  Darlington, a native of West Chester, was a physician and botanist, who was also one of the founding members of the Chester County Cabinet of Natural Sciences in 1826.  At the time Chester County already had a rich botanical history since it was home to John Jackson whom I mentioned in the last post and to Humphry Marshall who had a conservatory and botanical garden on his farm and sold North American trees and shrubs to European collectors.  His Arbustum Americanum: The American Grove (1785) was the first botanical book produced in America written by a native-born American on American plants.  Though he died in 1801, his garden remained for some time, and Darlington had plants from there in his herbarium.  He also had specimens collected on the Peirce family forest land, which later became Longwood Gardens and from Bartram’s Garden during the time it was being managed by John Bartram’s descendants (Schneider, 2009). 

When I was beginning my herbarium investigations, I gave a talk at the Botanical Society of America’s annual meeting and afterwards a woman suggested I visit West Chester because they had a great historical collection.  I am very sorry that I don’t recall her name because I would love to thank her for the suggestion.  I first visited in 2012 and the curator Sharon Began was very welcoming and helpful.  I had a wonderful time looking at specimens collected by Constantine Rafinesque, William Baldwin, Elias Durand, and Edward Tuckerman.  But there was more, Darlington corresponded and traded specimens with Charles Short, John Torrey, and Asa Gray in the United States and William Jackson Hooker, Augustin de Candolle, and Carl Agardh in Europe.  He opened correspondence with many of these by sending each a copy of the flora of West Chester that he first published in 1826.

During that same visit, I met McColl who was then technician in the university’s special collections and already had a serious interest in Darlington, who had been a major figure in the life of West Chester well beyond his botanical interests.  He was a physician for most of his career, having studied at the University of Pennsylvania under the botanist Benjamin Barton.  He was also important to the political and economic life of West Chester.  He served three terms as congressman as well as being president of the local bank and railway.  Special Collections has several of his letter books where he copied out his correspondence with such notables as de Candolle and Lady Dalhousie, botany enthusiast and plant collector as well as wife of the Governor General of Canada.  I had a great time, was hooked on learning more ,about Darlington and ended up writing an article about how John Torrey (1853) came to name the pitcher plant Darlingtonia californica after him (Torrey, 1853). 

This required a few more trips to West Chester, but I hadn’t been there in several years and so hadn’t seen the herbarium in its new quarters.  When McColl learned of the biology department’s plans, he did a little measuring and figured out how he could store most of the herbarium’s cabinets in the special collections vault.  They just fit.  Also in the vault are the hundreds of books that were in Darlington’s library, including many of the great botanical resources of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, among them an edition of Linnaeus’s short works that had been given to John Bartram and passed on to Darlington by one of Bartram’s descendants.  This book may have been a gift in recognition of Darlington’s publishing a twin memorial on Humphry Marshall and John Bartram based on papers shared with him by members of both families .  McColl argues that this publication, along with a memorial to the botanist William Baldwin who was a good friend, make him a significant early chronicler of American botany.

What caught my eye on my first visit to the collection were the notes that Darlington had attached to many of his specimens, including some that were of personal importance.  One was on a specimen of Darlingtonia brachyloba, a plant de Candolle had named after him.  It was collected in 1847 from “the tomb of my blessed wife.”  He did not note that this name had been synonymized to Desmanthus brachyloba (now Desmanthus illinoensis) in a 1841 publication by the British botanist George Bentham, even though he knew all about it.  When Torrey told him of naming the pitcher plant after him, he wrote back to him fearful that the “odious” George Bentham would do the same to this plant since he had just published a description of a new pitcher plant.  In the herbarium there’s a copy of the Torrey’s publication of the species and a letter from him assuring Darlington that the name was safe.  Torrey even went to the trouble of including a tracing of the illustration in Bentham’s paper, along with a copy of the legend.  I think you can see that Darlington’s herbarium is as much archive as herbarium and has found an appropriate home where, I might add, McColl has had the entire collection digitized over the past few years.

Notes: I am very grateful to Ron McColl for taking the time to show me so many treasures.

References

Schneider, W. M., & Potvin, M. A. (2009). The historic Bartram’s (Carr’s) Garden Collection in West Chester University’s William Darlington Herbarium (DWC). Bartonia, 64, 45–54.

Torrey, J. (1853). On the Darlingtonia californica, a new pitcher-plant from northern California (pp. 1–11). Smithsonian Institution. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/15291

Herbaria in Libraries

Title page of John Jackson’s herbarium given to Francis Alison. Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library.

In this post on herbaria and libraries, I’ll look at cases, and there are many, where herbaria are found in archival collections.  These are usually bound, like books, and of more historical than scientific interest, though that is changing somewhat now.  The 16 volumes of the Italian botanist Ulisse Aldrovandi’s 16^th century collection at the University of Bologna have been deconstructed for conservation reasons and the sheets stored in archival boxes.  They have also been the subject of a recent study where the species, most collected around Bologna, were compared with those growing in the same area in the 19^th and 21^st centuries (Buldrini et al., 2023). 

Here I want to look at a few herbaria that aren’t nearly as old but still fascinating.  As I mentioned in the last post, I visited the University of Delaware in February and while I was there I was able to see treasures from its Special Collections.  My guides were Manuscripts Librarian Rebecca Johnson Melvin and Senior Research Fellow Mark Samuels Lasner.  We met in the room housing the Lasner Collection of books, art, and other materials from the Victorian era.  It’s furnished with bookcases and two long tables in William Morris style down to the Morris-inspired fabric on the chair cushions.  One table displayed items from Lasner’s and the library’s collection of Charles Darwin-related material, since I had been invited to speak at an event as part of the university’s Darwin Day celebrations.  There was wonderful material including early editions of many of Darwin’s books.  Lasner had a page of The Various Contrivances by which Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects (1862) opened to one of the beautiful lithographs done by George Sowerby II, who had spent 10 days at Darwin’s home working on these illustrations, leaving Darwin at the end “half-dead” (Costa & Angell, 2023).  My favorite piece in Lasner’s display was a 19th-century cartoon by Joseph Keppler from the humor magazine Puck:  Darwin and a pantheon of great minds are highlighted against the enemies of science.  It is labeled “Reason Against Unreason” and seems very timely. 

Before my visit, I had asked Melvin if I could see the herbaria of John Jackson (1748-1821), but she had already put them on her list of items to show me.  They contain plants collected by Jackson at and around his botanical garden and farm, Harmony Grove, in Chester County, Pennsylvania.  I had first encountered him, or at least one of his specimens, in the collection of the physician and botanist William Darlington (1782-1863), which is at West Chester University and is the subject of my next post.  This specimen has a note from Darlington explaining that the plant had come from Jackson’s garden and had been grown from seeds brought back from the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  That intrigued me and so I looked up Jackson, discovered where his herbarium was kept, and took this opportunity to get a look at it.  There are two albums; the thin one with a lovely title page dedicating it to Jackson’s neighbor, the physician Francis Alison.  The larger album has no dedication, but I found a specimen collected by Darlington when his initials WD, which he often used, caught my eye.  It was like meeting an old friend.  Because of the fragility of the paper, I didn’t examine every page, but I got a good sense of the care Jackson took in making the collection.  He was a generation older than Darlington, but they were both Quakers living in an area steeped in the study of natural history and especially botany.  The next day, I went to Special Collections at Swarthmore College, where there is a collection of papers relating to Jackson and his relatives.  I found little about his interest in botany, but did come upon a surprise:  a small notebook filled with plant specimens, each numbered and labeled with common names.  It is dated 1833-1866, but the creator is unknown.  It might be a young person’s collection; it was a surprising little jewel revealing the family’s continued interest in plants.

Melvin also had on display notebooks created by Elizabeth Carrington Morris and her sister Margaretta who were  19^th century naturalists in Philadelphia.  Elizabeth was particularly interested in botany while Margaretta focused on entomology.  They both corresponded with leading scientists in their respective fields, and for Elizabeth that included Asa Gray and Darlington who encouraged the work done by both sisters.  Each one created notebooks that can only be described as exquisite.  Elizabeth painted exceptionally fine paintings of plants and also landscapes; these were interspersed among poems done in fine calligraphy.  Catherine McNeur (2023) has recently written an interesting book on the pair, arguing that they had a significant influence on the development of natural history in the United States.

Next to the notebooks were two student herbaria done by an African-American sister and brother, Anna and Arthur Dickenson in Xenia, Ohio in the early 20^th century.  They had carefully filled in the information in their printed herbarium workbooks and added the specimens, making these good examples of what once was relatively common in American education, in this case in a segregated school.  The final item on display was one I knew about but had never seen and consequently had not fully appreciated.  It is the artist book The Arctic Plants of New York City created by James Walsh (2016).  At least a decade ago on a snowy night in Brooklyn, I had attended the opening of a show of his work.  Though he hadn’t yet produced his book, his theme at the time was Arctic plants, by which he meant those that grew in northern Europe and were brought to the New World by European colonists, and some became weeds here.  At the exhibit, the specimens were on the wall.  In the book they are meticulously mounted, one on a page, with key words printed around each and more information on the opposite page.  The “page” for each plant is heavy cardstock with a mat around the specimen, giving it even more depth.  It is indeed an art book—and an herbarium. 

Note: I want to thank John Jungck for the invitation to speak at the University of Delaware and to Karn Rosenberg for her many kindnesses during the visit. I am especially grateful to Rebecca Johnson Melvin and Mark Samuels Lasner for sharing their treasures and expertise with me. Finally, thanks to so many kind people who made my time at the university so wonderful.

References

Buldrini, F., Alessandrini, A., Mossetti, U., Muzzi, E., Pezzi, G., Soldano, A., & Nascimbene, J. (2023). Botanical memory: Five centuries of floristic changes revealed by a Renaissance herbarium (Ulisse Aldrovandi, 1551–1586). Royal Society Open Science, 10(11), 230866. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230866

Costa, J. T., & Angell, B. (2023). Darwin and the Art of Botany: Observations on the Curious World of Plants. Portland, OR: Timber Press.

McNeur, C. (2023). Mischievous Creatures. New York: Basic Books.

Walsh, J. (2016). The Artic Plants of New York City. New York: Granary.

Outreach in Finland

Linaria vulgaris (yellow toadflax) collected by Elias Lönnrot in 1860 in South Häme, Finland; Herbarium TUR

At the back of each issue of Taxon, the journal of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, there’s a section called “Plant Systematics World” edited by Sandra Knapp and Jun Wen.  In the October 2023 issue, there was an article by Finnish researchers (Lehtonen et al., 2023) telling of the celebrations around the 100th anniversary of the founding of the herbarium at the University of Turku (TUR).  It enthusiastically describes the herbarium’s history and present-day activities through the lens of the events, exhibits, and online media developed for the occasion.  These are great examples of herbarium outreach, something that’s on the minds of many in the herbarium world who are attempting to increase their institutions’ place in the public consciousness.

TUR became a physical reality in 1922, two years after the founding of the university.  A little history is needed here.  From the 13^th century, Finland was part of Sweden until 1809 when it became part of Russia until declaring its independence in 1917 during the Russian revolution.  In Helsinki, the nation’s capital, the official language at the time was Swedish, but at the new institution it was Finnish.  Thus it was significant that one of the founding collections for the herbarium was that of Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884), who wrote a poem based on Finnish folklore and myths and also helped develop Finnish as a cohesive language, part of a national awakening.  With a great interest in plants and language, he created Finnish botanical terminology, most of which is still in use.  In addition, he published the first book in Finnish on the country’s flora.  As part of the anniversary celebration, the 750 extant specimens from Lönnrot’s herbarium were digitized and made available online, and this was given media attention:  one of the hallmarks of outreach.

Lönnrot is a great example of how herbarium history intertwines with culture and politics.  Another case occurred during World War II when Finland staved off a Soviet attempt to invade the country and went on to annex the Karelia region from the Soviets.  In an effort to make a case for East Karelia as botanically part of Finland not Russia, researchers from the University of Turku studied the region’s flora.  One of the participants was Lauri Kari, a pioneer in color photography.  Many of his slides were included in an online exhibit about Finnish botany during the war.  The interest in this presentation, which had also been given media attention, was so great that the website crashed on the first day.

The article gives the sense that present-day curators of the collection’s heritage are very aware of it and want their fellow citizens to know about it.  There were several physical as well as virtual anniversary events.  The first was a BioBlitz on the university’s campus in May 2022.  Next was an exhibit on Seili Island off the coast of Turku where the university has as biodiversity research unit that encourages ecotourism.  In the distant past, the island served as a refuge for lepers and later as a mental hospital.  Many of the old wooden buildings remain, and one was the site of a display on the herbarium’s activities. 

Later the presentation was expanded and moved to Turku’s main library, with material from the herbarium collection.  There were interactive displays including a puzzle on assembling a plant plastome genome and a balsa log which children could try to lift to show their strength.  Needless to say botanical art was represented, including old botany charts and anatomical plant models.  These were accompanied by examples of student herbaria.  Until 1969, making an herbarium was a mandatory part of the Finnish school curriculum, so some visitors had memories of this activity and a number had even kept to their collections.  Some younger visitors also have such memories because the requirement was reinstated in 2004, though now a school can decide whether to require a physical collection or an digital one.  To me this says a lot about the place of plants in Finnish culture and what Finns value. 

The library exhibit was accompanied by a series of eight lectures that were also available digitally.  They dealt with the research activities of the university’s Biodiversity Unit that houses the herbarium.  The most popular talk was given by Kati Pihlaja a researcher in the herbarium who spoke about the mistletoe Viscum album and its presence in Turku over recent years.  Its spread is being tracked with the help of a community or citizen science project, yet another form of outreach.  Another session dealt with a project to develop a Flora of Turku, and there was one on using herbarium specimens to assess endangered species.  The program planners knew their audience and so included a presentation on indoor molds and wood-rooting fungi that are a special problem in a country with so many wooden structures. 

I felt invigorated when I finished reading this short article.  It was exciting to read about an herbarium that is focused on its history and its cultural significance as well as on botany.  It is also one that is definitely looking to the future in terms of its research agenda as well as its use of social media and digitization of its collection.  This outreach in many different directions seems to me exemplary, though I’m aware that it’s hardly unique.  Herbaria worldwide are adopting such practices as they become increasingly aware of the important contributions they can make to the community at large and even to national identity. Examples of these initiatives will be the focus of the remaining posts in this series.

Reference

Lehtonen, S., Cárdenas, G. G., Huhtinen, S., Huttunen, S., Keskiniva, V., Kosonen, T., Kuusisto, I., Lampinen, J., Lempiäinen-Avci, M., Llerena, N., Luong, T. T., Marsh, T., Oksanen, H., Pihlaja, K., Puolasmaa, A., Riikonen, R., Toivonen, M., & Wahlsten, A. (2023). Herbarium TUR celebrates its 100 years. TAXON, 72(5), 1196–1198. https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.13069

Correa in the United States 1812-1820

Abbé José Correa da Serra

The last portion of José Correa da Serra’s long-term exile from his native Portugal was spent in the United States (see earlier posts 1,2,3).  After leaving France, this botanist-diplomat landed in Norfolk, Virginia in 1812 and made Philadelphia his favored city.  Soon he was known to the botanist Benjamin Barton, who had written the first botany text written in the United States, and he traveled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to meet Henry Muhlenberg, who would publish a book on North American plants.  In 1813, he visited Thomas Jefferson for the first time, and the two got along so well that as I mentioned in the first post, one of Monticello’s bedrooms was referred to by the family as Correa’s room.  Like Jefferson, Correa knew Paris well and also had spent years in England.  He was politically astute and was also scientifically literate like the former president.  When Jefferson was writing a proposal for a university in Virginia, Correa gave him advice on the structure and also on the curriculum, particularly in the areas of botany and agriculture (Davis, 1955). 

            When he arrived in the US, Correa was 62 years old but managed to do some significant traveling in a day when long journeys were always arduous.  In 1812, he went to New York City and then north to Lake George and into Vermont, as far north as the Canadian border.  His aim was then to go west to visit Niagara Falls, but the War of 1812 with Britain disrupted these plans.  The conflict also made communication with Europe more difficult and held up the transfer of funds from the Portuguese government to Correa.  The situation worsened to the point that Correa traveled to Boston, intending to sail back to Europe, but funds arrived in time to allow him to stay.  While in botanist, he befriended the young botanist Jacob Bigelow and looked through Correa’s herbarium which is no longer extant (Ewan, 1956). In June 1814, he traveled to Pittsburg and then on to Lexington, KY, making botanical and agricultural observations as he went; he later presented a paper at the American Philosophical Society on the soils of Kentucky.  From there he again visited Monticello where he met a young neighbor of Jefferson’s Francis Gilmer whose interest in botany Correa encouraged. 

            By September of the same year, Correa was again at Monticello, this time intending to head to Cherokee settlements, receiving a letter of introduction from Jefferson to a Cherokee agent.  Francis Gilmer was eager to accompany Correa and so in September 1814 the two set out with Jefferson for Poplar Forest, his retreat near the Blue Ridge Mountains.  On the way they stopped at the Natural Bridge and Correa speculated on how it had come to be.  Gilmer kept a careful notebook of his and Correa’s botanical observations.  The two then traveled through southwest Virginia to Knoxville where they spent several days botanizing and visiting Cherokee territory.  Gilmer’s notes included five pages on Cherokee vocabulary.  They then went to Athens, Georgia and met William Greene, a mathematics professor at the University of Georgia who was also interested in botany.  They traveled on to Augusta on the Savannah River and then to Charleston, South Carolina.  I live about a half hour east of Augusta in Aiken, South Carolina, and I’ve driven up to the University of Georgia a number of times; it’s over a two-hour trip.  From my home to Charleston is at least two and a half hours.  But Correa were traveling through relatively unpopulated territory over trails rather than roads.  This was indeed a significant journey. 

            Correa’s reason for visiting Charleston, besides its being the heart of culture in the Carolinas, was to meet Stephen Elliott, who was, of course, a botanist.  He knew of Correa’s trip from Muhlenberg and another Pennsylvania botanist, Zacchaeus Collins, and greeted the travelers warmly.  Correa was only planning to stay overnight, but as he wrote later, he remained for two weeks being entertained by Elliott and others, including the Rutledges, descendants of John Rutledge one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  From Charleston they went once again to Monticello, reaching there in early December.  Correa told Jefferson that Elliott, who wrote two volumes on the plants of South Carolina and Georgia, was the ablest botanist he had met in the US.  Correa then spent Christmas with Gilmer in Winchester, Virginia and traveled on to Delaware to usher in the New Year with his Paris friend Pierre du Pont. 

            Of course, Correa ended his trip in Philadelphia, where he remained botanically active.  At the University of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Barton was unable to teach his botany course in 1815, so Correa took on the assignment and did so well that he repeated it in 1816.  By that time, he had written a short text reworking Muhlenberg’s book on North American plants with a natural classification system.  This was thought to be the first presentation of such a system in the US.  However, during his later years in the country he had less time for travel and botany because he was occupied with diplomatic affairs.  He received an official assignment from the Portuguese government and submitted his credentials to President James Madison and Secretary of State James Monroe.  The relationship between the two countries was strained over shipping issues, with US privateers attacking Portuguese ships traveling between Europe and Brazil.  In 1820 when the political situation finally improved in Portugal he returned, but by then he was not well.  He did receive many honors, but died in 1823. 

References

Davis, R. B. (1955). The Abbé Correa in America, 1812-1820: The Contributions of the Diplomat and Natural Philosopher to the Foundations of Our National Life. Correspondence with Jefferson and Other Members of the American Philosophical Society and with Other Prominent Americans. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45(2), 87–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005770

Ewan, J. (1956). Correa da Serra and American Botany. Rhodora, 58(686), 45–48.

Correa in France 1802-1812

Antoine Laurent de Jussieu

In this series of posts (1,2) on the Portuguese botanist and diplomat José Correa da Serra, it’s time to examine the years he spent in France.  By the end of 1801 he decided that the new Portuguese ambassador to Britain with whom he didn’t agree politically, was making his life so unpleasant in London that Paris seemed to provide a more welcoming atmosphere.  Through his wide correspondence, he already knew such key botanical French figures as Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and Augustin Pyramus de Candolle.  Soon after his arrival, he was ensconced in a scientific circle that included not only these botanists but also the zoologist Georges Cuvier and the explorer Alexander von Humboldt.  It became common for the four to meet regularly at de Candolle’s home for discussions on plants, geography, and natural history in general.  Apparently Correa had a friendly manner, was without pretension, and was knowledgeable on a broad range of topics, explaining why he seemed to fit into whatever milieu he encountered (Davis, 1955). 

His ten years in Paris were his most scientifically productive period.  He spent much time at the Jardin des Plantes, which was then the hub for French natural history and where Jussieu, de Candolle, and Cuvier all worked.  It had an excellent herbarium that Correa took advantage of.  It was in France that he wrote his work on citrus classification published in 1805, though he had been doing research on this family for some time.  He used Jussieu’s natural classification system and introduced the idea of symmetry as an important element in classification. 

As I mentioned in the first post in this series, after my initial introduction to Correa as a friend of Thomas Jefferson’s, he kept popping up in my reading in surprising places, including the plant morphologist Agnes Arber’s (1950) The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form.  Quite some time ago, I had done research on Arber’s ideas on plant anatomy that were influenced by Wolfgang von Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants(1790).  When I reread Arber’s book more recently, there was Correa, who hadn’t registered with me before.  She introduces him in a chapter on Goethe’s idea of type as a general concept of a plant “from which the concepts of existing plant forms could be derived mentally” (p. 59.)  She writes of Correa’s “very stormy” life as explaining his dearth of publications, but notes:  “The little that he published was, however, of an original character, and disclosed luminous ideas” (p. 60). 

Arber argues that de Candolle took from Correa the idea of a type, a plan underlying each group of plants.  Correa called this symmetry and as he explained in an article on monocots and dicots, he meant by this the particular arrangement of the parts which results from their respective situation and their forms.  De Candolle added that symmetry here means a general system of organization, a non-geometric regularity of organized bodies as a result of spatial repetition of forms.  Correa presented these ideas in papers on seeds and fruits published in the annals of the Museum of Natural History in Paris.  He based his work on careful observation, studying not only external anatomy but also doing dissections, especially of reproductive structures, using the facilities at the Jardin des Plantes.  He argued that such comparative anatomical work was essential in answering questions in classification.  He had also extensively studied the research of others, quoting from the literature in several languages.  It must be noted that wherever he lived, Correa had access to fine botanical libraries.  And though de Candolle wrote at one point scolding him that he was less assiduous in his work than he could be, he nonetheless contributed important observations to botanical conversations of the day.

Because of his diplomatic contacts, Correa traveled not only in scientific circles but in political ones as well.  He knew the Marquis de Lafayette and Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, who had served in King Louis XVI’s government and was involved in working out the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War.  When the French Revolution began six years later, he emigrated with his family to the United States, where his son eventually founded the company that retains the family name today.  Over the years Du Pont traveled back and forth between the two countries.  It was probably through Lafayette and Dupont that Correa met American diplomats like David Warden and Joel Barlow.  These individuals all supported Correa in his decision to leave France and move to the United States.  This new exile was precipitated by Napoleon who was pressuring Correa to write glowingly of French science.  As before, Correa chose to uproot himself rather than to soften his views. 

Lafayette, Dupont, and Humboldt all provided Correa with letters of introduction to Thomas Jefferson, but it turned out that he didn’t even need them since his diplomatic contacts put him in touch with President James Madison, who in turn contacted Jefferson about the new arrival.  But before traveling south, Correa set himself up in Philadelphia because at this point he knew enough about the country to realize that this was its intellectual center.  It had the American Philosophical Society and its library, as well as the Academy of Natural Sciences.  Politics could wait until he found his scientific footing, as will become clear in the next post.

References

Arber, A. R. (1950). The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form. Cambridge University Press.

Davis, R. B. (1955). The Abbé Correa in America, 1812-1820: The Contributions of the Diplomat and Natural Philosopher to the Foundations of Our National Life. Correspondence with Jefferson and Other Members of the American Philosophical Society and with Other Prominent Americans. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45(2), 87–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005770

Correa in England (1795-1801)

Robert Brown

In the last post, I introduced José Correa da Serra, a Portuguese botanist/diplomat/ priest whose liberal views caused him trouble at home and sent him into exile in England in 1795.  This was a turbulent time with Britain just emerging from the loss of its American colonies, the Revolution continuing in France, and Portugal wrestling with its vast colony of Brazil.  No matter where he went Correa managed to be involved in Portuguese diplomatic circles, and botanical circles as well.  Since Portugal lacked a sophisticated scientific community, Correa sought foreign correspondents to share botanical ideas and as sources of the latest information (Davis, 1955).  Whether he planned it this way or not, these contacts allowed him to move from country to country and quickly fit into new botanical milieus.  Since he was already in contact with James Edward Smith, founder of the Linnean Society with whom he corresponded for 38 years, he was able to seek help from Smith’s fellow botanist Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society and influential in political circles as well, to say nothing of his role as unofficial director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. 

Correa must have had impressive language skills, because he was able to present papers in English as well as French and Portuguese.  Correa, through another of his correspondents, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, botanist at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, became interested in the natural system of plant classification as an alternative to Carl Linnaeus’s artificial classification system.  The latter was based on plants’ reproductive structures, making it easy to use, but it resulted in putting plants in the same class that differed greatly in other characteristics.  A natural system was built on a broader variety of traits, though specifically which traits should be considered was up for discussion.  The French botanist Michel Adamson, a generation older than Jussieu, had also worked on the same problem.  The British were less interested in natural systems, having been the first country outside Sweden to accept Linnaean classification.  Also, France and Britain were at odds politically, making French ideas less palatable. 

For Correa, the natural system made sense and he pushed that point in England, including by presenting a paper on the subject to the Linnean Society.  He interested a young Scottish botanist Robert Brown in the concept.  Brown was serving with the military in Ireland and using his free time to collect plants and investigate them.  He was in contact with James Smith and with the Linnean Society vice-president Jonas Dryander, and through them, not surprisingly, with Correa.  Brown had heard via this grapevine that Joseph Banks was searching for a botanist to accompany Captain Matthew Flinders on his planned circumnavigation of Australia.  Banks had approached Mungo Park, who had already led an expedition to Africa, but Park declined even after repeated urgings from Banks (Schwartz, 2021).  Brown was too self-effacing to contact Banks directly, so he asked Correa for an introduction and thus received a glowing recommendation.  The resulting expedition made Brown’s career in botany.  He collected prodigiously with the assistance of a gardener from Kew Peter Good and the botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer, and he later became Banks’s librarian and keeper of his herbarium. 

Brown was grateful to Correa for his assistance, and when reporting to Banks during the trip, he always asked to be remembered to Correa.  When Brown published his list of Australian plants, including his own many discoveries, in Prodromus Novae Hollandiae (1810), he employed the natural classification system.  Correa used it himself in his work on citrus fruits.  In 1799, he read a paper at the Linnean Society in which he moved two genera of plants into a new, natural family called Aurantia renaming Crateva marmelos as Aegle marmelos (now in the Rutaceae) and Crateva balangas as Fermonia balangas; the name A. marmelos has held.  Correa was also interested in plants growing in water.  He presented a paper at the Linnean Society in which he argued that algae reproduced sexually.  He provided details of the observations of Johann Friedrich Gmelin and Joseph Gaertner, two German botanists, who took different views.  Then he presented his case, which was hardly correct in all its details since reproduction in algae wasn’t worked out until the middle of the 19^th century, but he made a number of astute observations.

Correa also wrote a fascinating paper on a “submarine forest” in Lincolnshire, this time to the Royal Society.  He and Banks went on a botanical excursion to this region on England’s east coast.  He describes an area where at low tide “islets” appear that are composed of tree trunks, roots, branches, and leaves, intermixed with aquatic plants.  There were a few erect tree trunks, but most had fallen over and were in various states of decay.  He was able to make out some of the species present including oak, birch, and fir.  There were other trees in the mix, but he admitted that he didn’t know enough about the comparative anatomy of trees to identify the other woods.  He also discussed how this area may have become submerged and suggested it might be due to land subsidence.  After reading this article it didn’t come as a surprise to learn that Correa had an interest in soil and geology; his knowledge in these areas is obvious here.  His depth of understanding seems to have allowed him to take advantage of new opportunities that opened for him, such as exploring the English seaside, and then eventually moving on to France.

References

Davis, R. B. (1955). The Abbé Correa in America, 1812-1820: The Contributions of the Diplomat and Natural Philosopher to the Foundations of Our National Life. Correspondence with Jefferson and Other Members of the American Philosophical Society and with Other Prominent Americans. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45(2), 87–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005770

Schwartz, J. (2021). Robert Brown and Mungo Park: Travels and Explorations in Natural History for the Royal Society. New York: New York Botanical Garden Press.

Abbé Correa’s Bedroom

Abbé Correa’s room at Monticello with his portrait. Thomas Jefferson Foundation

Several years ago I visited Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson.  On the tour the docent remarked that one of the bedrooms on the first floor was dubbed by the family as “Abbé Correa’s room,” after a Portuguese priest who was a favorite guest and stayed there a number of times.  I had never heard of Correa, nor had I known that the deist Jefferson had a priest friend.  With a little investigation, I learned that the abbé was José Correa da Serra, a Portuguese diplomat who spent much of his life in exile and was a naturalist with a special interest in botany (Davis, 1955).  The last item was all it took to put Correa on my radar.  From then on I made a note whenever I encountered his name, which turned out to be in a number of different contexts. 

When I was researching the Pennsylvania botanist/physician William Darlington (Flannery, 2019), I came across an article with footnotes referring to Correa’s connections with Thomas Nuttall, Benjamin Barton, and Henry Muhlenberg, so he definitely moved among the botanical elite in the United States, where he lived from 1812 to 1820.  In a biography of the French botanist André Michaux, I learned that Michaux’s son François had written a letter of introduction for Correa to the eminent Philadelphia physician Caspar Wistar (Savage & Savage, 1986).  Correa met François Michaux while living in Paris from 1802 to 1812.  There he was also friends with such scientific stars as botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, head of the Jardin des Plantes André Thouin, and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, as well as zoologist Georges Cuvier and hero of the American Revolution Marquis de Lafayette. 

Most surprising to me is that Correa turned up in plant morphologist Agnes Arber’s (1950) The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form.  I had read this book a number of times without registering his name, but now that my antennae were up, there he was in a section on how Correa had influenced Jussieu’s views on natural classification as well as those of the British botanist Robert Brown.  It turned out that before Correa had lived in France, he had been in England from 1795 to 1801.  He was allowed into the country through the good services of none other than the botanical czar Joseph Banks and had friends like Brown and the head of the Linnean Society, James Edward Smith.  How did someone seem to move so easily into the most elite scientific circles in three countries?  That’s what I will try to explore in this series of posts.

Correa was born in Portugal in 1751, but his wealthy family moved to Naples when he was six years old, and he received his early education there.  He then moved to Rome and was tutored by the Portuguese philosopher Luís António Verney who introduced him to botany.  By his early 20’s, Correa was already corresponding with the likes of Carl Linnaeus.  While in Rome he earned a doctorate in law and also studied for the priesthood before returning to Portugal.  There he became an associate of the Duke of Lafões whom he had met when the Duke was living in exile in Italy.  Exile seems to be a major theme in this story, and one of the dangers of being in the upper echelons of society in a politically volatile country.  The duke was able to return home because a new monarch led to an easing of restrictions. 

Both Lafões and Correa were on the liberal side both politically and religiously, and in 1779 they founded the Royal Academy of Sciences in Lisbon in an effort to revive the rather dormant scientific community there.  Correa set about collecting plant and animal specimens for the museum they envisioned.  He also studied botany in earnest and that meant corresponding with botanists in several countries, since there were few opportunities for enrichment at home.  Apparently Correa had a very pleasant manner about him as well as a keen mind filled with information.  This made him an attractive correspondent, with both sides enriching their knowledge through the interchange.  It may have begun with an aging Linnaeus, but went on to include the likes of Smith in England and Jussieu in France.  Correa early on became interested in alternatives to the artificial classification of Linnaeus, and this was a common bond among them.

Meanwhile Lafões and Correa worked to develop the Academy, including by publishing the latest research.  However, they soon encountered resistance from more conservative factions, so publication became a slow process.  They continued on with this project until the mid-1790’s when the Academy gave safe haven to a naturalist Pierre-Marie Broussonet who had to flee France because of his political activities during the French Revolution.  Local authorities who were already suspicious of the Academy put Correa under surveillance, and he was also being scrutinized by the Catholic Church’s Portuguese Inquisition. 

Correa’s position became untenable, and in 1795 he went to England, not returning to his native land for 25 years.  Not only was he allowed into England, but he was welcomed into the cream of botanical society.  He was elected a member of both the Linnean Society and the Royal Society, and over the next seven years presented papers at meetings of both.  What his botanical work in England involved, I’ll cover in my next post. 

References

Arber, A. R. (1950). The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davis, R. B. (1955). The Abbé Correa in America, 1812-1820: The Contributions of the Diplomat and Natural Philosopher to the Foundations of Our National Life. Correspondence with Jefferson and Other Members of the American Philosophical Society and with Other Prominent Americans. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45(2), 87–197. https://doi.org/10.2307/1005770

Savage, H. Jr., & Savage, E. J. (1986). André and François André Michaux. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.

History: Two Sessions

View of the original garden and the Botanical Museum at the Padua Botanical Garden.

This is the last in a series of posts (1,2,3) on the recent meeting of the History of Science Society in Portland, Oregon.  I’ll wind up by mentioning two sessions I haven’t touched upon yet, including a panel that I very much wanted to attend, but couldn’t.  I was prevented because I had to present at the same time at a roundtable on teaching history of science at Christian Institutions.  It was developed by Francesca Bordogna and chaired by Phillip Sloan, both from the Liberal Studies program at the University of Notre Dame.  Michael Weismeyer, who teaches at the Southern Adventist University, and I were the other two panelists. 

When I was at St. John’s University in New York, I did not teach history of science, but I used history in my teaching of biology.  This was especially true of the Scientific Inquiry course I taught with a focus on evolution.  For example, I presented Charles Darwin’s work in historical context including the importance of natural theology, with its emphasis on learning about nature as a way to come closer to God.  This was a particularly popular idea in Britain and the United States in the 19^th century and led to a flurry of natural history activities such as plant collecting (Barber, 1980).  My point was that science and religion can have a supportive relationship and aren’t always at odds.  I also stressed that I wasn’t aiming to have students give up their belief in creationism, but rather to enable them to develop a better understanding of evolution as a scientific concept. 

Weismeyer uses modules from the Reacting to the Past project in his teaching.  These involve role playing around various scenarios, such as a debate on whether or not Darwin should receive the prestigious Copley Medal.  Bordogna discussed her challenges teaching about the philosopher William James and how some of her students viewed his pragmatist views as at odds with Catholicism.  Sloan discussed getting beyond the opposition between science and religion by using phenomenology and other approaches that break down the objective/subjective dichotomy.  What I found most interesting is what came out in the discussion:  all four of us did not see our institutions as pushing back against our teaching, but rather it was a subset of our students who attempted to censure what we taught.

While this session was going on, there was another one I wanted to attend on “Digital Projects and the History of Science: Shifting Practices and the Challenges of Digital Platforms.”  It was chaired by Ben Gross of the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, a wonderful institution for history of science research; I know about it mainly from their social media feeds and videos.  The speakers included Adrianna Link from the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.  I know her from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine’s group on Collections and Collecting.  If you are unaware of the Consortium, it has a host of resources including groups that host monthly seminars.  It was great to finally meet Adrianna in person after “knowing” her for several years on Zoom. 

I also met another member of this panel, and her presentation was the one I was most sorry to have missed.  Elena Canadelli is a faculty member at the University of Padua and scientific director at the Botanical Museum of the Padua Botanical Garden.  Founded in 1545, it is the oldest botanical garden still in its original location.  Over the past several years the garden has been revitalized and expanded with new greenhouses and a biodiversity garden, yet without substantial change to the original historic garden that has retained its integrity.  The Botanical Museum has been newly fitted out with among other things, restoration of the botanical lecture theater as well as the recreation of a 16^th-century pharmacy.  Along with all this, there is a project to digitize the garden’s herbarium of over 600,000 specimens.  While the museum displays include specimens and portions of the garden’s seed collection, a digital presence will make the garden’s treasures much more accessible. 

Also representing the University of Padua was historian Luca Tonetti who is involved the digitization of Italian natural history collections within the National Biodiversity Future Center, a project to conserve and enhance Italian and Mediterranean biodiversity.  It’s nice to see that history is represented in this endeavor.  Yet another participant was Katja Kaiser of Berlin’s Museum of Natural History.  I “know” her through her article on how duplicate botanical specimens were distributed by the museum, which was the central clearing house for collections sent back from German colonies in the late 19^th century (Kaiser, 2022).  There were also representatives from the National Museums of Scotland and the Max Planck Institute for History of Science. 

According to the abstract for the session, the panel discussed the various digital projects at the institutions represented and delved into the many issues involved in creating content and making it easily available to a broad constituency.  Also, there is the major question of sustainability.  The internet has been around long enough that we can mourn a number of wonderful projects that are no longer available—even on the Way Back Machine.  Another important topic is how gaps in the archival record are often revealed in the course of digitization projects.  Archives retain not only the records themselves, but a record of how they were managed or mismanaged over the years.  I was glad to see such a panel at the HSS meeting because it suggests the importance of the digital to the continued vitality of the field.  I’ll end by mentioning an interesting few minutes I spent with Stephen Weldon, who teaches at the University of Oklahoma and is also the society’s bibliographer.  The HSS journal Isis has long published a yearly bibliography of history of science literature.  There has now been an online version available for several years, and this is what Weldon, one of the developers, guided me through.  It keeps getting better and better.  As I explored it I became less frazzled by the reality that the print version will soon become history.

References

Barber, L. (1980). The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Kaiser, K. (2022). Duplicate networks: The Berlin botanical institutions as a “clearing house” for colonial plant material, 1891-1920. British Journal for the History of Science, 55(3), 279–296. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000139

History: Indigenous Knowledge

Ligusticum porteri, oshá or bear root; illustration by Edith Clements in Rocky Mountain Flowers (1920), Biodiversity Heritage Library.

In this series of posts on presentations at the recent History of Science Society meeting in Portland Oregon, indigenous knowledge was an important theme in the sessions on botanical history.  This was noted in the previous post on how British botanists recorded indigenous plant names and uses in their journals.  In a session on Plant Knowledge, Macey Flood and Natasha Myhal of Ohio State University dealt with examples of interactions between ethnobotanists and Native American healers in the 20^th century.  Flood’s investigation dealt with the research of Huron Herbert Smith (1883-1933), who was head of the botany department at the Milwaukee Public Museum where his specimens are housed.  He worked with Native Americans in Wisconsin, particularly healers, attempting to document their use of plant material.  He saw this tradition dying out as there were few taking up the work of elderly practitioners.  However, he was biased against the functionality of these substances, seeing his work mainly in terms of recording a tradition.  In comparison with this approach, Myhal discussed her research in the Southwest with a present-day ethnobotanist of the Diné (Navajo) people, Arnold Clifford who lives in New Mexico.  He collects plant specimens for several institutions as well as for his personal herbarium that he’s kept since his student days. 

            Clifford and Myhal collaborated on a project involving a plant called oshá or bear root by the Diné, while other Native Americans have different names for it.  It is Ligusticum porteri, also known as wild parsnip.  Its root is crushed and used to treat a variety of ailments, including easing sore throats and respiratory ailments.  It has become a popular herbal medicine, leading to overharvesting.  It was this issue that Clifford and Myhal dealt with in their work, developing projects on tribal land were the plant could be sustainably harvested.  This was a very different kind of project from Smith’s which was less about working with Native Americans and more about transcribing their knowledge into a form acceptable to the anthropological establishment.  Clifford’s work as a botanist, documenting the botanical riches of Diné lands and surrounding areas, is another aspect of his research.  It is an ongoing endeavor, very much related to the bear root project since he is providing information on a wide variety of species present in natural settings at this point, so the specimens can be used in the future to track changes in the territory.  It is really about making historical records for later generations.

            Scheduling is always a problem at meetings with sessions running concurrently.  I didn’t get to Ana Hidrovo-Lupera’s presentation, but did meet her later.  An Ecuadorian doctoral student at Pennsylvania State University, she discussed the different perceptions of Ecuadorian and United States researchers about a plant called “cundurango,” Marsdenia cundurango.  In Ecuador, its bark was used to treat digestive tract problems like indigestion.  In the 1870s there was some evidence that it could cure cancer, and the Ecuadorian government was interested in pursuing this idea in hope that it would lead to development of a profitable commodity like the source of quinine, cinchona, which grows alongside cundurango.  At that time the United States sent a Naval team to survey the area and collect cundurango.  When the material was brought back to the US, it was tested for effectiveness in treating cancer.  The research wasn’t successful and interest in the plant faded.  Hidrovo-Lupera argues that there was no attention paid to its indigenous use, a possibly effective treatment for digestive ailments.  The research was focused on what the US team saw as a problem, and they ignored the indigenous knowledge.  As she notes, “the collecting practices of American scientists and expeditioners during the 19^th century remained colonial in their understanding of medicinal plants as objects of nature rather than artifacts of knowledge.”

            In the same session, there was another interesting plant-related paper that contrasted indigenous with colonizer attitudes toward plant remedies.  Austen Walker, also a graduate student at Penn State, spoke on a 1801 legal case in New Granada, a Spanish-controlled state in northeastern South America that included present-day Colombia and Panama.  A woman of mixed race named Atanacia Cañón was tried for providing three women with an abortifacient that proved fatal for two of them.  The prescribed punishment was either permanent exile or death, but the testimony of a colonial physician saved her.  He testified that contrary to indigenous reports of the treatment’s effectiveness, the plants used could not cause abortion.  This was considered the more substantial of the two viewpoints, and the result was that Cañón was sentenced to two years’ incarceration.  This relates to Londa Schiebinger’s (2017) work on the use of abortifacients in Guyana.  In the 18^th century colonial physicians from Britain studied the peacock flower, Caesalpinia pulcherrima, and found evidence of its effectiveness.  However, while they communicated these results to colleagues in the colony, this information was not broadcast back home, where the upper classes were interested in keeping birthrates as high as possible.  These are both fascinating stories about ways plant knowledge were manipulated during colonial periods in a variety of different settings.  History again provides evidence that medical knowledge is always influenced by culture. 

Reference

Kaiser, K. (2022). Duplicate networks: The Berlin botanical institutions as a “clearing house” for colonial plant material, 1891-1920. British Journal for the History of Science, 55(3), 279–296. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000139