Rhodora 
JOURNAL OF 
THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 
Vol. 17. July, 1915. No. 199. 
/ SOME NEGLECTED NAMES IN WALTER’S FLORA 
CAROLINIANA. 
S. F. BLAKE. 
THE first general descriptive flora of any part of the United States 
using the binomial system was Walter’s Flora Caroliniana, published 
at London in 1788 by John Fraser, who had met Walter in Carolina 
in 1785 and brought back to England the manuscript of the work. 
The Walter herbarium, after being in the possession of the Fraser 
family for many years after Walter’s death in 1788, was presented 
in 1849 to the Linnaean Society and purchased for fifteen shillings: 
by the British Museum in 1863. The specimens, occupying 117 pages 
in a large volume, are arranged alphabetically for the most part, with 
the grasses ! and the few extant types of Walter’s new genera at the end. 
As already remarked by Britten ? and Hitchcock,* many of Walter's 
types are missing and some of those which remain are in poor condi- 
tion. [n many cases, in genera wherein Walter described new species 
as well as Linnaean, no trace of the former can be found, while the 
latter which could so well be spared are represented by identifiable 
specimens. Many of the plants are labeled only with the generic 
name, and, in such cases as that of Chironia (= Sabatia), whose six 
species of the Flora are represented by seven specimens, it is often a 
matter of some difficulty to determine which should be considered the 
types, from the general insufficiency of Walter’s descriptions. Even 
where there is a named specimen it is sometimes, although rarely, 
1 The grasses of the Walter collection have been the subject of a paper by A. S. 
Hitchcock (16th Rep. Mo. Bot. Gard. 31 (1905)). 
2 Britten, Journ. Bot. xxxvii. 485 (1899). 
? Hitchcock, 16th Rep. Mo. Bot. Gard. 32 (1905). 
