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Copyright of Studia Historiae Scientiarum is the property of Jagiellonian University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Warning: Readers of this article are warned that it may contain terms, descriptions and opinions that are culturally sensitive and/or offensive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. John Dallachy (1804–71) was employed by Baron Ferdinand von Mueller to collect plants as a pioneer resident of Cardwell, Rockingham Bay, Queensland, 1864–71. Mueller's longest-serving paid botanical collector, Dallachy was also the most prolific collector of types among Mueller's large network of collectors. In part, Dallachy's success can be attributed to his collecting methods and intensive travels around the species-rich Rockingham Bay area. In part, also, Dallachy was indebted to fellow European pioneers for support (which was acknowledged in the eponymy of new taxa), and to local Indigenous and South Sea Islander people. Dallachy managed these relationships in a context of frontier war as local Indigenous people resisted being displaced by European colonists. Nevertheless, Dallachy's opportunity to work as a full-time professional botanical collector, and the rapidity with which his new specimens were identified and published was, to a large extent, due to Mueller. The partnership with Mueller led to Dallachy contributing ~3500 specimens from Rockingham Bay to the Melbourne Herbarium of which ~400 taxa were considered new to Western science. Warning Readers of this article are warned that it may contain terms, descriptions and opinions that are culturally sensitive and/or offensive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. This paper examines the botanical collecting activities of John Dallachy (1804–71) at Rockingham Bay, Queensland, 1864 to 1871. His productiveness was due to his ability to manage relationships with other settlers at Rockingham Bay in the context of a frontier war with Indigenous people, and his successful partnership with Baron Ferdinand von Mueller (1825–1896), pre-eminent Australian botanical taxonomist of the second half of the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The citation 'Rockingham Bay, J. Dallachy' is prominent in late nineteenth-century taxonomic publications associated with the flora of tropical Queensland. John Dallachy (1804–71) was employed as a botanical collector by the Melbourne Botanic Garden under the directorship of Baron Ferdinand von Mueller. Between 1864 and 1871, Dallachy resided in the Rockingham Bay area where he collected ~3500 botanical specimens of which ~400 were described as new taxa of flowering plants, ferns, fungi and bryophytes, making him Mueller's most prolific collector of type specimens, apart from Mueller himself. In this, the first of two articles about Dallachy, we outline the origin, and development of this successful botanical collaboration, identifying the experiences and qualities that prompted Dallachy to become a botanical collector, the friendship that formed between Mueller and Dallachy in the face of Dallachy's reversal of fortunes at the Melbourne Botanic Garden, and the circumstances that led to Dallachy and Mueller's shared project to investigate the botanical riches of the floristically diverse Wet Tropics Bioregion. This paper examines the career of John Dallachy (1804–71), with an emphasis on his early training as a gardener in Britain, his subsequent association with the Melbourne Botanic Gardens and complex relationship with Ferdinand Mueller, and later pioneering move to Rockingham Bay, Queensland as a prolific botanical collector. Image: John Dallachy's entry of 1826 in 'The handwriting of under-gardeners and labourers'. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Collections, London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discovering biological diversity is a fundamental goal—made urgent by the alarmingly high rate of extinction. We have compiled information from more than 100 000 type specimens to quantify the role of collectors in the discovery of plant diversity. Our results show that more than half of all type specimens were collected by less than 2 per cent of collectors. This highly skewed pattern has persisted through time. We demonstrate that a number of attributes are associated with prolific plant collectors: a long career with increasing productivity and experience in several countries and plant families. These results imply that funding a small number of expert plant collectors in the right geographical locations should be an important element in any effective strategy to find undiscovered plant species and complete the inventory of the world flora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines changing spatial patterns of botanical collections over a 400 year time frame, focussing on the collections at the Natural History Museum (BM) in comparison with global patterns. The Plant Collector Resource Database, which contains 68,000 collector records was used to generate 250,667 unique collector × country × date records. We observe an exponential increase in the number of collectors over time. The activities of collectors were investigated in 50-year time-slices from 1650–2000. We specifically considered the geographic scope of collections (i.e., countries in which collections were made), the depth of collections (i.e., the number of collectors per country) and the uniqueness of collections (i.e., the proportion not duplicated in other herbaria). Uniqueness was highest for the earliest time-slice. Collector activity is shown to be strongly influenced by extrinsic factors such as the development of trade and empire, which allowed for collections to expand in scope and depth, and conflicts, which reduced collecting activity. A striking finding concerns the uniqueness of collections through time. The considerable unique element of the collections in herbaria highlighted by this study provides a strong motivation for digitization efforts to ensure that collections are accessible to address key questions in systematics, biogeography, and ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the 1790s, newspapers in Britain, Ireland and the United States carried brief reports about the activities of Maurice Spillard, described as a "celebrated English pedestrian traveller". Spillard, who may have been Irish, served in the British forces during the American Revolutionary War in the late 1770s. His exploits as a "pedestrian" were reported to have included botanical and geographical exploration, particularly in eastern and central North America including the Mississippi and Missouri basins, in which he was improbably linked with Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Spillard's botanical collections (including seeds and living plants), if they existed, were reported to have been seized by French privateers, resulting in a decree by the French Minister for the Navy requesting the safe return of this property. Spillard had contacts in London, including with the publisher Cadell & Davies, who paid an advance to Spillard. Said to have died in Dublin in 1800, Spillard reappeared in Paris in 1802, when his claims were refuted by Milfort Tastenagy (Jean-Antoine Le Clerc), and the "pedestrian traveller" was shown up as a fraud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ronald Campbell Gunn was one of the foremost Australian plant collectors who sent specimens to William and Joseph Hooker during the first half of the nineteenth century, until he abruptly broke off all correspondence. In a letter sent to Joseph Hooker two decades later, in 1870, Gunn reveals the reasons for this hiatus, and sends specimens of Tasmanian Acacia species and of a New Zealand plant now known as Phormium cookianum subsp. hookeri (Gunn ex Hook. f.). Remarks in the letter on these specimens reveal a controversy with Ferdinand Mueller on definition of species, and allow correction of the erroneous locality for the Phormium later published by Hooker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hasso von Wedel, usually "H. Wedel" on specimen labels, settled on the northwestern Caribbean coast of Panama in the province of Bocas del Toro in 1898 and sustained himself mainly through the production of picture postcards and as a photographer for the United Fruit Company. He learned to prepare bird specimens in 1926 and collected widely in Bocas del Toro for various museums, mainly Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, at least up until 1939. Wedel made the first collections of birds from the easternmost Caribbean coast of Panama in the Comarca de San Blas at intervals from 1929 until 1934. He learned the fundamentals of botanical collecting in 1938 and made extensive collections of plants for the Missouri Botanical Garden from then until 1941, his specimens forming the basis for dozens of presumed new species, at least ten of which were named for him. His biological explorations appear to have ceased about the time the United States entered the Second World War, although he lived in Changuinola, Bocas del Toro, until his death at Almirante in 1957. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gunung Tahan is the highest mountain peak in Peninsular Malaysia (2187 m a.s.l.) and is a part of Taman Negara Pahang that houses many rare and endemic species of flora and fauna. This account is conducted to evaluate, compile, and update the orchids collections from Gunung Tahan after almost 126 years, since the first botanical exploration was conducted by H.N. Ridley and other foreign botanist. The compilation presented in this study resulted in 294 species obtained from the selected herbarium, published record, and current expedition. A total of 57 species were recorded for recent work, out of which 18 species were new discoveries for Merapoh Trail and thus reported as new records for Gunung Tahan. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species version 2017.3 listed two species; Claderia viridiflora Hook.f. and Spiranthes sinensis (Pers.) Ames as least concern species and Paphiopedilum bullenianum (Rchb.f.) Pfitzer as endangered species. The list of the compiled species from herbarium and published records for Gunung Tahan is also included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Stephen West Williams Herbarium, an important early collection of plants from western Massachusetts, is in the Henry N. Flynt Library of Historic Deerfield. Most of the plants in the herbarium were collected between 1816 and 1818 in Deerfield, Franklin County, Massachusetts. The herbarium had apparently never been systematically examined by contemporary botanists prior to our work. The 390-page herbarium contains 556 specimens representing 453 species, 74% of which are native and 26% introduced. Eight of the native species in the herbarium are now considered rare in Massachusetts. Reflecting Williams' interest, about half the specimens in the collection had a medicinal use. Intensive floristic surveys in Deerfield between 1944 and 2015 failed to find 64 (14%) of the species collected by Williams, including about 4% of the native and 42% of the introduced species. The specimens establish a pre-1820 date for the presence of at least 90 introduced species that are currently considered naturalized in Massachusetts. The collection also provides documentation for 34% of the vascular plants in Edward Hitchcock's 1829 'Catalog of Plants Growing without Cultivation in the Vicinity of Amherst College,' the first flora for the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trafficking natural objects and trafficking cultural objects have been treated separately both in regulatory policy and in criminological discussion. The former is generally taken to be ‘wildlife crime’ while the latter has come to be considered under the auspices of a debate on ‘illicit art and antiquities’. In this article we study the narrative discourse of high-end collectors of orchids and antiquities. The illicit parts of these global trades are subject to this analytical divide between wildlife trafficking and art trafficking, and this has resulted in quite different regulatory structures for each of these markets. However, the trafficking routines, the types and levels of harm involved, and the supply–demand dynamics in the trafficking of orchids and antiquities are actually quite similar, and in this study we find those structural similarities reflected in substantial common ground in the way collectors talk about their role in each market. Collectors of rare and precious orchids and antiquities valorize their participation in markets that are known to be in quite considerable degree illicit, appealing to ‘higher loyalties’ such as preservation, appreciation of aesthetic beauty and cultural edification. These higher loyalties, along with other techniques of neutralization, deplete the force of law as a guide to appropriate action. We propose that the appeal to higher loyalties is difficult to categorize as a technique of neutralization in this study as it appears to be a motivational explanation for the collectors involved. The other classic techniques of neutralization are deflective, guilt and critique reducing narrative mechanisms, while higher loyalties drives illicit behaviour in collecting markets for orchids and antiquities in ways that go significantly beyond the normal definition of neutralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of a remarkable Rhode Island landscape traces the transformation and subsequent celebration of one of the earliest surviving collections of Japanese botanicals in the country. While horticultural historians have applauded George Rogers Hall's groundbreaking importations and architectural historians given passing notice to Charles A. Platt's later house and garden on a portion of the site, the significance of the plant hunter's legacy remains unexplored. The evolution of the Hall landscape reveals ties to nascent landscape preservation and memorialization efforts elsewhere, including Boston, Philadelphia, and the Brandywine Valley, and also to an overlooked revolution in manners and priorities of gardening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]