HIGHLIGHTS OF BOTANICAL EXPLORATION IN THE NEW WORLD 213 



Ira L. Wiggins from September, 1949, to the summer of 1956 carried on 

 investigation in the field to provide the basis of a taxonomic treatment of 

 the vascular plants of arctic Alaska north of the Brooks Range, under the 

 auspices of the Arctic Research Laboratory. He was assisted in the field by 

 John H. Thomas and Henry J. Thompson in 1950, Kenton Chambers in 

 1951, George H. Ward and George E. Lindsay in 1952. Field investigations 

 covered the area in the immediate vicinity of Point Barrow very thoroughly, 

 and other areas north of the crest of the Brooks Range and west of the 

 mouth of the Colville River less thoroughly. Howard Crum did especial 

 collecting at Cape Lisburne, and Lloyd Spetzman provided data on some- 

 what more than 400 species and subspecies of vascular plants which he has 

 collected or noted north of the Brooks Range in his work for the Arctic Insti- 

 tute of North America. The large numbers of plants collected and experience 

 gained in the field, together with arctic Alaskan specimens on file in the 

 major herbaria of the United States, form the basis of a taxonomic treat- 

 ment of the "Flora of Arctic Alaska," the draft manuscript of which was com- 

 pleted by Professor Wiggins in 1956. 



In recent or contemporary time, field investigation in Canada has been 

 most active. After the productive eras of the Macouns, M. O. Make, Chief 

 Botanist at the National Herbarium of Canada, 1921-1933, carried on 

 extensive botanical exploration in all the provinces of the country. His large 

 collections are for the most part in the National Herbarium. He published 

 very little and made no major contribution to the Canadian botanical 

 literature. 



For the past thirty years A. E. Porsild, presently Chief Botanist, National 

 Herbarium of Canada, has been the outstanding field investigator of boreal 

 American vegetation. He has led no fewer than sixteen major expeditions to 

 various and remote parts of Canada and unquestionably has contributed 

 more to the botany of boreal America than any other botanist now living. 

 After early work in west Greenland, he began floristic and phytogeographic 

 studies in arctic and boreal northwest America, where he spent seventeen 

 summers and seven winters. In 1926, after working through the spring and 

 early summer in central Alaska, he traveled down the Yukon to the coast, 

 where he spent the summer and autumn around the Norton Sound and 

 Seward Peninsula and Kotzebue Sound region. The following winter he 

 continued by dog sledge along the north coast of Alaska to the Mackenzie 

 River, where the succeeding two years were spent exploring the arctic coast 

 and hinterlands lying between the Mackenzie and Coppermine Rivers and the 

 Great Bear Lakes area, the region traversed with such privation and tragedy 

 by Richardson and his party nearly a hundred years earlier. The summer of 

 1929 he went to James Bay, and in 1930 explored the Kazan River area of 

 central Keewatin and the west coast of Hudson Bay between Churchill and 



