210 MAGUIRE 



The twentieth century, essentially the life span of the Botanical Society 

 of America, ushered in a new era of field botany characterized by a diminu- 

 tion in exploration on the grand scale and an intensification in regional and 

 local field activity. The necessity for natural-resource inventory, the reacti- 

 vated and more exacting requirements of phytogeography, the more critical 

 demands of ecology and cytogenetics, the implications of paleobotany and 

 structural and historical geology have compelled more precise attention to 

 details of distribution, habitat, abundance, and morphologic variation as they 

 obtain among individuals and populations in the field. 



If the term exploration brought to the minds of our predecessors of the 

 nineteenth century the idea of expedition in the grand manner, the concept 

 must now be expanded to include not only field excursion over long periods 

 of months to remote places, but also to field operation involving narrower 

 special interests and the more intensive study of restricted and not necessarily 

 remote areas. It is in this more general sense that the term exploration is 

 used in this paper. 



It will perhaps be useful to present this account of the highlights of con- 

 temporary exploration in the Western Hemisphere in geographical sequence, 

 beginning first at the north. 



I. BOREAL AMERICA 



The early great voyages and epic explorations of boreal America, begin- 

 ning with the visit to Alaska of Steller in 1741, had been concluded by the 

 middle of the nineteenth century. Hooker in the Flora B or eali- Americana 

 (1829-1840) had brought together and organized the collections of the pioneer 

 British field botanists John Richardson, David Douglas, and Thomas Drum- 

 mond. Ledebour in the Flora Rossica (1841-1853) had recorded the Ameri- 

 can collections of Chamisso, Eschscholtz, Wormskjold, and their compatriots. 



During the succeeding half century, many collectors contributed to the 

 body of materials and records of the floras of Canada, Alaska, and Green- 

 land. The collation of this newer body of material, combined with the his- 

 torical record, was published over a period of two decades (1888-1902) in 

 the Catalogue of Canadian Plants by John Macoun, Botanist of the Geo- 

 logical Survey of Canada. This work brought to a close the first hundred 

 and fifty years of boreal American field work. 



Eric Hulten, eminent student of arctic botany and author of the Floras of 

 Kamchatka, the Aleutian Islands, and Alaska and the Yukon Territory, has 

 prepared an interesting and thoroughly documented account of the history 

 of botanical exploration {Botan. Notiser, 289-346) in Alaska and Yukon. 

 He lists more than two hundred collectors who have worked in this region 

 before 1940. Hulten himself during the year 1925, together with his assistant 

 J. E. Eyerdam, in a visit to the Aleutian Islands collected some 3800 numbers 



