A Flora of California

A Flora of California
ISBN-10
1330270886
ISBN-13
9781330270882
Category
Science
Pages
694
Language
English
Published
2015-06-04
Publisher
Forgotten Books
Author
Willis Linn Jepson

Description

Excerpt from A Flora of California, Vol. 2 The first publication that may in a wide and rather loose use of the term be called a "flora" of the Californian area is the "California Supplement" (1838-1841) in Hooker and Arnott's Botany of Beechey's Voyage. In this Supplement are described the collections made by David Douglas during the years 1831 and 1832 in the Coast Ranges, chiefly in the central region. About five hundred and seventy-six species of vascular plants are listed. Some of these plants were obtained by other collectors and a few were gathered far northward beyond the present boundaries of California. In so early a day, the term California, extremely indefinite, was not infrequently compelled to do duty as far as the basin of the Snake River or the snowy volcanic peaks that look northward to the gorge of the Columbia River. Several collections earlier than those of Douglas had been made in California. The La Perouse Expedition visited Monterey in 1786 but later perished in the South Seas. The botanist of the Malaspina Expedition, Thaddeus Haenke, collected around Monterey in 1791. A few of his California plants were published in Presl's Reliquiae Haenkeanae (1830-1831), but the greater part were destined to lie at Prague for many decades and over one hundred and forty years elapsed before the California collection was taken up as a whole for serious study. Archibald Menzies, botanist of Vancouver's Voyage, made at a half-dozen points along our coast line important collections at intervals from 1791 to 1795, but his plants, nearly all new, were published in a scattered manner by various authors, mostly one or two at a time, over a long period of years. The Russian Kotzebue Expedition visited San Francisco Bay in 1816 and small collections were made by the naturalists, Adelbert von Chamisso and Johann Friederich Eschscholtz. Chamisso's new California plants were not given to the botanical world separately but were published periodically in connection with various materials gathered elsewhere by the expedition. Eschscholtz is the author of a paper with the title "Descriptiones Plantarum Novae Californiae," containing twelve Californian species described as new. This is the first paper, almost exclusively Californian, to bear the word California in its title (Mem. Acad. Imp. Sci. St. Petersbourg, ser. 6, 10:281-292,-1826). After David Douglas came Thomas Nuttall in 1836, whose collections along our south coast, rich in new species discovered and described by him, were mainly published in Torrey and Gray's Flora of North America (1838-1843). The small collections of the "Sulphur" Expedition, made by Hinds and Barclay along the California coast in the autumn of 1837, were included in the general botanical report of the expedition. The various governmental Pacific Railroad Surveys brought surveying parties to the Pacific Coast from 1853 to 1855, each with its botanist or naturalist. The botanical reports in the various volumes of the Surveys were, in the absence of other literature, extremely useful to those educated men who as gold seekers from the eastern United States lived in California from the year 1848 onward. There were other expeditions by sea, many other expeditions by land (notably those of John C. Fremont), and there were numerous lone individual explorers, but from the beginning of scientific collection in 1786 no publication resulted for full ninety years that could be called a "flora" for our area, save the "California Supplement" appearing in the Botany of Beechey's Voyage. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

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