Circulating Specimens: Getting Stuck

Acer circinatum collected on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, in the Academy of Natural Sciences Herbarium at Drexel University, owned by the American Philosophical Society

The last post dealt with the way specimens have been moved around since the first herbaria were created in the 16^th century.  But like the human circulatory system that can suffer from clots and narrowing arteries, specimens can end up stuck in forgotten cabinets and cluttered attics.  In the late 19^th century Thomas Meehan was a botanical curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.  Its herbarium is home to specimens collected on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, though a portion of the original collection was lost in transit and some are still unaccounted for.  Once during the expedition and then after it, collections were sent, at President Thomas Jefferson’s direction, to the noted Philadelphia botanist Benjamin Barton, who had written the first botany text published in the United States.

Barton enlisted the aid of a German botanist Frederick Pursh who came to the United States to collect,.  Pursh worked on the plants, but eventually left for England with some of the specimens.  There he published a work describing many new species both from the Lewis and Clark specimens and also from those of Thomas Nuttall and John Bradbury who had collected in the United States and sent material back to Britain (McKelvey, 1955, p. 73).  Pursh got to examine and describe the plants before the two arrived home in a notable bit of taxonomic piracy.  He eventually sold the Lewis and Clark material to a voracious British botanist Aylmer Bourke Lambert whose collection was auctioned after his death.  A young American botanist, Edward Tuckerman, bought the lot with the Lewis and Clark specimens and eventually donated them to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, also the home of another portion of the expedition’s collections.  However, the plants were put in storage and remained in relative oblivion for decades.

If your head is spinning at this point, botanists working at the Academy of Natural Sciences have written two very lucid accounts of this and other aspects of the Lewis and Clark material (Spamer & McCourt, 2002; Spamer, Hawks & McCourt, 2002).  But now back to the late 19^th century and Thomas Meehan.  He was on the hunt for the Pursh specimens when someone told him that they might be at the APS.  Some searching finally brought them to light.  Since the ANS was nearby and had a significant herbarium plus the staff to curate it, the APS agreed to have the Lewis and Clark specimens transferred there, but the APS retains official ownership.

An even older collection had a different fate.  John Fraser was a British plant collector who arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in 1786.  He made contact with the French botanist André Michaux who had a nursery there, and also with Thomas Walter, who had a plantation outside the city and was writing a flora of the Carolinas.  Walter and Fraser went collecting together, and Fraser also traveled on his own more widely, going along the Savannah River with Michaux and traveling into what is now part of North Carolina on his own.  He made a collection of specimens, and Walter identified plants for him and even wrote descriptions of new species, which Walter added to his flora.   When Fraser was returning to England, Walter asked him to see to the publication of the flora.  Fraser did so and the specimens were bound in a volume with “Thomas Walter’s Herbarium” on the title page.  They became part of the collection now at the Natural History Museum, London, and didn’t receive much attention until the botanist Daniel Ward (2007) did a thorough study and published an article entitled “The Thomas Walter Herbarium Is Not the Herbarium of Thomas Walter.”  He argues that most of the plants were probably collected by Fraser, since many of the labels are in his handwriting and some of the plants are from areas visited by Fraser, not Walter.  Ward’s work was part of his effort to find type specimens for the plants Walter described.  In the process, he brought attention to Fraser and this rather obscure collection (Ward, 2017).

The work of Meehan and Ward played out before the mass digitization of specimens, but that effort has done wonders for the specimen circulatory system not only for the obvious reason of making them available on the internet.  A side effect is that preparing specimens for digitization has brought to light many interesting finds.  The curators at the University of Connecticut’s George Safford Torrey Herbarium discovered two specimens collected by Henry David Thoreau.  Moving to a new space is another was to revive circulation.  When the Cambridge University Herbarium relocated into a new building, historical collections were unearthed that have yet to be thoroughly studied (Gardiner, 2019).  Even more spectacular were the results of the project at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris to renovate the herbarium and at the same time digitize the collection.  The result was estimating the backlog of unmounted specimens at over 800,000; the process of organizing them is definitely the herbarium equivalent of open-heart surgery (Le Bras et al., 2017).  I find all these discoveries cheering, not only because I like surprises, but because they hint at still more interesting finds yet to come.

References

Gardiner, L. M. (2019). Cambridge University Herbarium: Rediscovering a botanical treasure trove. Journal of Natural Science Collections, 6, 31–47. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3603520

Le Bras, G., et al. (2017). The French Muséum national d’histoire naturelle vascular plant herbarium collection dataset. Scientific Data, 4(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2017.16

McKelvey, S. D. (1955). Botanical Explorations of the Trans-Mississippi West 1790-1850. Jamaica Plains, MA: Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.

Spamer, E., Hawks, C., & McCourt, R. (2002). The Lewis and Clark Herbarium of The Academy of Natural Sciences. Part 2. Notulae Naturae, 476, 1–16.

Spamer, E., & McCourt, R. (2002). The Lewis and Clark Herbarium of The Academy of Natural Sciences. Part 1. Notulae Naturae, 475, 1–46.

Ward, D. B. (2007). The Thomas Walter Herbarium is not the herbarium of Thomas Walter. Taxon, 56(3), 917–926.

Ward, D. B. (2017). Thomas Walter and His Plants: The Life and Works of a Pioneer American Botanist. New York: New York Botanical Garden.

Botanists in South Carolina: Thomas Walter

Specimen of Hydrangea arborescens subsp. radiata from the Walter Collection at the Natural History Museum, London Herbarium

In the last post, I described the work of Mark Catesby who traveled to the colonial South backed by patrons who were anxious for him to collect interesting plants, in part to adorn their English gardens.  This trend continued and a later visitor, John Fraser, arrived in Charleston after the American Revolution, in September 1786.  He was hunting for plants for British gardeners, most notably William Forsyth, Master of the King’s Garden in Kensington.  After meeting with the French botanist, André Michaux, who had a nursery near Charleston, Fraser headed north to visit the plantation of Thomas Walter.  An Englishman who settled in South Carolina around 1769, Walter eventually owned 4500 acres on the Santee River.  He occupied himself with business interests in Charleston and running his plantation, which in the South meant owning slaves.  In addition, he studied the botany of the region.  By the time Fraser visited, Walter had completed a flora of the Carolinas that included over 600 species.  Needless to say, he was a great help to Fraser in learning where to find interesting species.

Fraser traveled northwest to Augusta and spent the winter of 1786-87 collecting in northern South Carolina, some of the time accompanied by Michaux and his son.  While Fraser did not note localities for his collections, some are suggested by notes in Michaux’s journals.  In the fall of 1787 Fraser again visited Walter, who helped him identify his collections and write descriptions of new species, nearly 200 of them, that were added to Walter’s manuscript.  Fraser then packed up his 30,000 specimens as well as seeds and cuttings, and headed back to England in January 1788.  Walter entrusted his flora to Fraser, who arranged for its publication as Flora Caroliniana.  Because so many of the plants Fraser had collected were described by Walter and the specimens annotated by him, this collection became known as the Thomas Walter Herbarium.  But in a Taxon article entitled “The Thomas Walter Herbarium Is Not the Herbarium of Thomas Walter,” Daniel Ward (2007) makes it clear that this collection is of Fraser not Walter specimens.  Fraser saw Walter’s collection and received portions of specimens from him, but essentially the herbarium he brought to England was his own and is now at the Natural History Museum, London (NHM).

This provenance has some significance because many of the plants are type specimens for species first described by Walter, particularly for the ones that were collected by Fraser.  Ward’s article was written as he was preparing a book on Walter (2017) and involved in a project he called the “Walter Typification Project,” similar in its aims to the much larger Linnaeus Typification Project which spanned several decades and resulted in the publication of Order Out of Chaos (Jarvis, 2007).  Ward was very careful in his work.  Since the herbarium at NHM is not Walter’s, he assumes that these specimens weren’t used in writing species descriptions, so there are no holotypes in the collection.  However, where there is clear evidence that Walter saw and used Fraser’s material, then these are considered lectotypes.  For Walter names that do not have types, Ward chose recent collections as neotypes.

It is significant that Walter’s Flora Caroliniana was the first book on North American plants to use Linnaean nomenclature and to arrange species according to the Linnaean sexual system of classes.  It is obvious from the species descriptions in the Flora that Walter was well versed in Linnaeus’s work.  He owned copies not only of Species Plantarum, but also Systema Naturae and Genera Plantarum.  Ward thinks that the only plant that Walter included without having seen it, is the Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, described by the British botanist John Ellis in 1768 from specimens sent him by John Bartram.

Walter died soon after the Flora was published at a relatively young 49 after being in ill health for some time.  One of his granddaughters became the mother of another prominent South Carolina botanist, Francis Peyre Porcher, who will be the subject of a future post.  William Fraser began a nursery business in England and specialized in North American plants.  He and his son traveled several times to the United States and also to Cuba and Russia.  They started a nursery in Charleston in 1791 and continued to ship plants from there back to England for 20 years.  It was Fraser’s son who gave his father’s herbarium to the Royal Horticultural Society, and when the Society got into financial trouble in the 1850s, the collection was sold to what was to become the NHM.

As with so much of the South’s past, there is little physical evidence of Walter’s life along the Santee.  Near his home, he had created one of the first botanical gardens in North America, shortly after those of John Bartram and his cousin Humphry Marshall in Pennsylvania.  This disappeared soon after his death, as eventually did his home and herbarium.  However, 25 years after his death two of his daughters had a marble slab, still extant, laid near the house site in his memory.  The dedication noted:  “To a mind liberally endowed by nature and refined by a liberal education he added taste for the study of Natural History and in the department of Botany, Science is much indebted to his labours” (Rembert, 1980, p. 12).

References

Jarvis, C. E. (2007). Order Out of Chaos: Linnaean Plant Names and Their Types. Linnaean Society.

Rembert, Jr, D. H. (1985). William Pitcairn, MD (!712-1791)—A biographical sketch. Archives of Natural History, 12(2), 219–229.

Ward, D. B. (2007). The Thomas Walter Herbarium is not the herbarium of Thomas Walter. Taxon, 56(3), 917–926.

Ward, D. B. (2017). Thomas Walter and His Plants: The Life and Works of a Pioneer American Botanist. New York Botanical Garden.