Journal the New York Botanical Garden

Journal the New York Botanical Garden

VOL. XXXVI FEBRUARY, 1935 No. 422 JOURNAL OF THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN THE BRITTON HERBARIUM IS ESTABLISHED CHRONICLE OF THE CACTI OF EASTERN NORTH AMERICA (Continued from the January luue) JOHN K. SMALL PRAYING MANTIDS AT THE GARDEN CAROL H. WOODWARD A LOAN COLLECTION OF LANTERN SLIDES FORMAN T. MCLEAN GARDEN-CLUB MEMBERSHIP IN THE BOTANICAL GARDEN SPRING PILGRIMAGE TO HOLLAND FLOWER SHOW ACTIVITIES OF STAFF MEMBERS AT PITTSBURGH MEETING OF A. A. A. S. THE BOTANICAL REVIEW A GLANCE AT CURRENT LITERATURE CAROL H. WOODWARD NOTES, NEWS, AND COMMENT PUBLISHED FOR THE GARDEN AT LIME AND GREEN STREETS, LANCASTER, PA. THE SCIENCE PRESS PRINTING COMPANY Entered at the post-office in Lancaster, Pa., as second-class matter. Annual subscription $1.00 Single copies 10 cents Free to members of the Garden THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN BOARD OF MANAGERS I. ELECTIVE MANAGERS Until 1036: ARTHUR M. ANDERSON, HENRY W. DE FOREST (President), CLARENCE LEWIS, E. D. MERRILL (Director and Secretary), HENRY DE LA MON­ TAGNE, JR. (Assistant Treasurer cV Business Manager), and LEWIS RUTHER- FURD MORRIS. Until 1937: HENRY DE FOREST BALDWIN (Vice-president), GEORGE S. BREWSTER, CHILDS FRICK, ADOLPH LEWISOHN, HENRY LOCKHART, JR., D. T. MACDOUGAL, and JOSEPH R. SWAN. Until 1938: L. H. BAILEY, MARSHALL FIELD, MRS. ELON HUNTINGTON HOOKER, JOHN L. MERRILL (Vice-president and Treasurer), COL. ROBERT H. MONTGOMERY, H. HOBART PORTER, and RAYMOND H. TORREY. II. EX-OFFICIO MANAGERS FIORELLO H. LAGUARDIA, Mayor of the City of New York. ROBERT MOSES, Park Commissioner. GEORGE J. RYAN, President of the Board of Education. III. APPOINTIVE MANAGERS TRACY E. HAZEN, appointed by the Torrey Botanical Club. R. A. HARPER, SAM F. TRELEASE, EDMUND W. SINNOTT, and MARSTON T. BOGERT, appointed by Columbia University. GARDEN STAFF E. D. MERRILL, SC. D Director MARSHALL A. HOWE, PH. D., SC. D Assistant Director H. A. GLEASON, PH. D Head Curator JOHN K. SMALL, PH. D., SC. D Chief Research Associate and Curator A. B. STOUT, PH. D Director of the Laboratories FRED J. SEAVER, PH. D., SC. D Curator BERNARD O. DODGE, PH. D Plant Pathologist FORMAN T. MCLEAN, M. F., PH. D Supervisor of Public Education JOHN HENDLEY BARNHART, A. M., M. D.. Bibliographer and Admin. Assistant PERCY WILSON Associate Curator ALBERT C SMITH, PH. D Associate Curator SARAH H. HARLOW, A. M Librarian H. H. RUSBY, M. D Honorary Curator of the Economic Collections FLEDA GRIFFITH Artist and Photographer ROBERT S. WILLIAMS Research Associate in Bryology E. J. ALEXANDER .... Assistant Curator and Curator of the Local Herbarium HAROLD N. MOLDENKE, PH. D Assistant Curator CLYDE CHANDLER, A. M Technical Assistant ROSALIE WEIKERT Technical Assistant CAROL H. WOODWARD, A. B Editorial Assistant THOMAS H. EVERETT, N. D. HORT Horticulturist HENRY TEUSCHER, HORT. M Dendrologist G. L. WITTROCK, A. M Docent ROBERT HAGELSTEIN Honorary Curator of Myxomycetes ETHEL ANSON S. PECKHAM. .Honorary Curator, Iris and Narcissus Collections WALTER S. GROESBECK Clerk and Accountant ARTHUR J. CORBETT Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds JOURNAL OF The New York Botanical Garden VOL. XXXVI FEBRUARY, 1935 No. 422 THE BRITTON HERBARIUM IS ESTABLISHED In commemoration of the late Dr. N. L. Britton, Director of The New York Botanical Garden from its incipient stages in the last decade of the preceding century until his retirement in June, 1929, at the age of seventy years, the Board of Managers of the Garden, at its annual meeting, held January 14, on motion of Dr. E. D. Merrill, Director, voted that the general herbarium (Phaner­ ogams) of The New York Botanical Garden be henceforth desig­ nated as THE BRITTON HERBARIUM, NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN. The building up of the reference collections was peculiarly close to Dr. Britton's heart and the above action seemed eminently fit­ ting. In Dr. Britton's lifetime he saw the great reference collec­ tions of botanical material in New York increased from the nucleus of the Torrey Herbarium of Columbia University, perhaps 400,000 specimens, deposited at the Garden in 1899, to more than 1,700,000, the second largest herbarium in America and one of the great her­ baria of the world. Precedents for this action are found in the designation of the fern herbarium of the Garden in 1907 as the "Underwood Fern Herbarium" in honor of Professor L. M. Un­ derwood, and of the moss herbarium of the Garden as the "Eliza­ beth Gertrude Britton Moss Herbarium" in 1934. CHRONICLE OF THE CACTI OF EASTERN NORTH AMERICA (Continued from the January issue) There is good proof that the Florida region was in recent geologic time much more elevated. This having been the case, 25 26 there would have been two warm table-lands, the one represented by the present emerged and less eroded peninsular Florida, the other by the lower and at present submerged Continental Shelf lying off the present coastline of the Florida peninsula. During their aerial existence the surfaces of these regions may have had a series of floristic coverings. Desert condition may have pre­ vailed at one time during which great cactus developments may have existed. When the present Continental Shelf went under the water, its aerial floristics ceased, and were followed by an aquatic flora which came down to us as we find it today. With a lower elevation and with other changes, the cactus flora of the present peninsula began to wane until the cactus arrangement took on its present form. The more modern botanical history of cacti in Florida dates from the year 1791, when William Bartram25 recorded26 and described (1791), though failed to name, a prickly-pear he found growing in northern peninsular Florida. A sporadic reference to prickly-pears in Florida was the describing and figuring of Opuntia Drummondii (1846) from plants gathered at Apalachi- cola.27 Nearly a third of the nineteenth century passed before prickly- pears were again associated directly with the flora of Florida. In 1852 Constantine Samuel Rafinesque28 records that, "having seen in gardens and herbals several rare and new sp[ecies] of Florida, I will here describe some of them."29 25 William Bartram was born 9 February 1739, at the botanic garden of his father, John Bartram (1699-1777), at Kingsessing, near (now in) Philadelphia. He was a clerk in Philadelphia for a few years, and then a merchant in Carolina, but he was an artist of no mean ability, and was more interested in botany than in business. In 1765 he joined his father in exploration in Florida, and was so charmed with the country that when his father returned home the next year he remained as a settler on the St. John's; but a few months later he returned to Kingsessing. From 1773 to 1778 he was engaged in botanical travels in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, of which an account was published in 1791. The rest of his life was spent at Kingsessing, and there he died, 22 July 1823.—J. H. B. 26 Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, 161. 1791- "The Botanist 5: pi. 246. 1846. 28 Constantine Samuel Rafinesque was born 22 October 1783, at Galata, the foreign quarter of Constantinople, Turkey, his father being a French V Whatever Rafinesque had in hand or in mind he does not make very clear for the benefit of posterity. In the case of each of the three species he proposed, he involves his own ideas with some previously published matter evidently concerning other kinds of prickly-pears. Recent attempts to associate Rafinesque's name with definite modern collections of prickly-pears do not prove satisfactory. The first serious attempt to present an interpretation of all the cacti of Florida did not appear until i860, when Alvan Wentworth Chapman30 published what he knew of the group in his "Flora."31 merchant and his mother of German parentage. He was educated in Italy, and was a precocious child, early devoting much attention to the natural sciences, particularly botany. He spent three years, 1802 to 1805, in Phila­ delphia; then lived for ten years in Sicily; in 1815 he returned to the United States, which became his permanent home. He is, in certain ways, the most interesting figure in the history of American botany: brilliant, but eccentric; indefatigable in travel, in study, and in writing, yet never thoroughly completing any line of work without being diverted to some other; snubbed and ignored by his contemporaries, but better appreciated in later years. From 1819 to 1825 he was professor at Transylvania Uni­ versity (now the University of Kentucky), and in that capacity was the first resident botanist west of the Alleghenies. For the remainder of his life his home was in Philadelphia, where he died in an attic, alone and almost friendless, 18 September 1840. It is nearly a hundred years since he passed from the scene, but he is not forgotten. As recently as 1931 there was published "Green River: a poem for Rafinesque," by James Whaler; an epic of nearly three thousand lines, reciting, with the aid of a lively fancy, the vicissitudes in the tragic life of this remarkable man.— J. H. B. 29 Atlantic Journal 146. 1832. The first species proposed by Rafinesque is Opuntia (Cactus) maritima and is said to grow on the seashore from Florida to Carolina. However, Rafinesque's own reference to a previously published work shows that the name is really founded on a description of Elliott. The second species proposed is Opuntia (Cactus) Bartrami and is founded on the account of an Opuntia in Bartram's "Travels.'' The Bar­ tram plant has not yet been rediscovered. (See Journal of The New York Botanical Garden 20: 21 & 30.

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