112 Alaskan Science Confereyice 



from England, Scandinavia, the United States and Russia paid 

 visits to the shores of Alaska and members of their companies 

 collected many of the native plants. The collectors often had 

 other duties which had first claim on their time, the botanical 

 field work being distinctly secondary. Some collectors were 

 ships' surgeons, others were junior officers with little special 

 training and a corresponding slight interest in the native flora. 

 The former type of collector usually took keen delight in the 

 work; the latter often endured it as one of the unpleasant but 

 necessary tasks assigned them by superiors. But whether col- 

 lected by enthusiastic medical men, by professional botanists 

 attached to military units, or by junior officers performing un- 

 interesting duties, large numbers of specimens, in the aggregate, 

 were collected, returned to herbaria in various parts of the 

 world, and information about the floras involved published. 



These results were usually obtained in spite of obstacles and 

 discouragement rather than because of their absence. Too 

 often the botanist going ashore had only a few minutes or a 

 few hours in which to secure whatever specimens he could. He 

 worked frantically to get as many as possible of the nearest 

 plants into press. In so doing he often had to neglect or com- 

 pletely ignore the smaller, or more scattered species. In high 

 northern latitudes the constant concern least the ship be caught 

 in advancing ice often caused a captain to signal immediate 

 return to the ship whether or not the full potentialities of the 

 collecting conditions had been exploited. One botanist, as late 

 as 1923, was thus hurriedly recalled to the ship before he could 

 obtain one-half of the total number of species on an attractive 

 stretch of arctic Alaskan coast. Such short forays ashore were 

 disheartening in the extreme to enthusiastic botanists. But 

 with the passage of time the collections continued to accumulate 

 until now they represent a high percentage of the total flora. 



A departure from chiefly government-sponsored scientific ex- 

 cursions to Alaska began toward the end of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. As mining operations in Alaska and adjacent Canadian 

 areas increased, more and more individuals interested in plants 

 made collections and wrote about the vegetation of the region. 



