Flora of Delaware and the Eastern Shore 



Shortly after Edward Tatnall's death his herbarium was ac- 

 quired by Colorado College, Colorado Springs, and the work of 

 mounting the specimens and making them available for study has 

 been completed by the botanical staff of that institution. Through 

 correspondence with Asa Gray many of the Tatnall duplicates 

 found their way to the Gray Herbarium, and others are in the 

 Tatnall Herbarium at Wilmington, and at the Academy of Natural 

 Sciences of Philadelphia. 



Albert Commons (1829-1919) extended his botanical explora- 

 tions throughout the state of Delaware, and assembled the most 

 extensive collection of Delaware plants ever made. This included 

 not only flowering plants and ferns, but also mosses, lichens and 

 fungi. His herbarium was presented by two of his nephews to the 

 Academy of Natural Sciences. It gives evidence of care and dis- 

 crimination on the part of the collector in the identification of his 

 specimens, and of his keenness in detecting new or rare material 

 in the field. 



Wilham M. Canby (1831-1904) was the most widely known of 

 the Wilmington botanists. He collected extensively in the southern 

 and southwestern states and on the Pacific Coast, as well as in the 

 local area. He was botanist in charge of the Northern Transconti- 

 nental Survey of 1882-83.* He assembled a herbarium of some 

 30,000 sheets of plants of North America and the Old World, which 

 was purchased by the New York College of Pharmacy in 1892. 

 Upon the organization, in 1891, of the Society of Natural History of 

 Delaware, of which he was a founder and the first president, he got 

 together a second herbarium for the museum of the new Society, 

 where it is now preserved in modern steel cases. This Canby 

 herbarium now contains more than 22,000 sheets, accumulated 

 gradually by a long series of accessions, continuing through the 

 years up to the time of the donor's death, and obtained by him 

 through purchase, exchange and personal collecting. Many 

 duplicates of Canby's Peninsula plants were distributed to the U. S. 

 National Herbarium, the Gray Herbarium, the Arnold Arboretum 

 and other depositories. In the years 1900-1903 Canby and C. S. 

 Sargent collaborated in a study of Crataegus of New Castle County, 

 Delaware, and the results were published by Dr. Sargent (1903) in 

 an important paper on this genus. Canby was the discoverer of a 



♦ See J. N. Rose: "William M. Canby", Bot. Gazette 37: 346-352, May, 1904. 



xviii 



