HIGHLIGHTS OF BOTANICAL EXPLORATION IN THE NEW WORLD 219 



Willis Linn Jepson has influenced west coast botany during our time 

 perhaps more than any other of the large school of contemporary Pacific 

 Coast botanists. The impact and importance of his major floras is well known. 

 Perhaps less emphasized in the evaluation of his work has been his effective- 

 ness and thoroughness as a field student of California plants. His large pri- 

 vate herbarium, the core of which is composed of plants of his own collecting, 

 served as the chief body from which he drew material for his Manual, his 

 Silva, and his Flora. 



During the past few decades, numerous state and local floras have been 

 written. It is perhaps accurate to state that not one of these has been suc- 

 cessfully accomplished without a thorough preparation of field investigation, 

 as is pointed up by the following: 



In the collation of material for his excellent Flora oj Indiana (1940), 

 Charles C. Deam collected for a period of forty years, and since 1914, by his 

 own reckoning, has collected over 59,000 numbers, and in travel, covered 

 over 125,000 miles. 



George Neville Jones and George Damon Fuller spent a preparatory 

 period of "more than a dozen years" of field activity in gathering record and 

 data for their Vascular Plants of Illinois (1955). 



For an Illustrated Manual oj California Shrubs (1957), Harold E. McMinn 

 spent twenty years collecting exsiccatae and living material from all parts 

 of California. Three hundred of the eight hundred species admitted to his 

 manual had been transplanted to his trial garden at Mills College and there 

 observed for structural variation. 



At the present time six major floristic works are in progress, all of them 

 supported by intensive new exploration. In New York, Stanley J. Smith and 

 his colleagues in the office of the State Botanist have been conducting a 

 county-by-county survey in the preparation of a new flora of the state. 

 C. R. Lundell and D. S. Correll and their colleagues at the Texas Research 

 Foundation are carrying out field exploration which will form the basis of a 

 flora of Texas. Julian A. Steyermark, with the extraordinary energy he has 

 always shown in the field, has completed the field activity and the preparation 

 of manuscript for his Flora of Missouri. P. A. Munz and D. D. Keck have 

 put together their independently gained long field experience and that of 

 researches of the Carnegie Institution at Stanford to write a new flora of 

 California. This work is approaching completion. C. L. Hitchcock, Arthur 

 Cronquist, Marion Ownbey, and J. W. Thompson have under preparation a 

 flora of the Vascular Plants of the Pacific Northwest. Ira L. Wiggins has 

 essentially completed his flora of the Sonoran Desert. All these projects 

 have involved an extensive program of plant exploration. I shall comment 

 on the field activity of the last two. 



Preparatory work for the new Vascular Plants of the Pacific Northwest 

 has been under way some fifteen years. Its collaborators combine a wide 



