2 20 MAGUIRE 



range of talent and experience. The senior author, C. L. Hitchcock, has 

 collected widely throughout the Rocky Mountain, Intermontane, and Pacific 

 West, and particularly during the past number of years has concentrated 

 field excursion in the geographical area of their flora. His extensive col- 

 lections combined with the still larger lifetime collections of J. W. Thompson 

 form the backbone of the working herbarium at the University of Washing- 

 ton. At Washington State College, Pullman, are the important collections 

 of Piper, Cusick, and St. John and the enormous herbarium of some 30,000 

 sheets of W. N. Suksdorf. All these collections have been made in the region 

 of the northwest flora. In addition, the writers have had available the her- 

 barium of M. E. Peck at Willamette University, which houses the approxi- 

 mately 30,000 numbers collected by Peck during his long life of plant 

 exploration throughout the state of Oregon. Cronquist has conducted field 

 exploration in Idaho, Washington, Montana, and Oregon from 1939 to 1955, 

 during which time he has accumulated a total of 4800 numbers yielding some 

 38,000 sheets. The first set is at The New York Botanical Garden; the nu- 

 merous duplicates are widely distributed. 



J. H. Christ, formerly in government service, amassed a large personal 

 herbarium of about 18,000 specimens, mostly unicate numbers, collected 

 between the years 1921 and 1953 in all parts of Idaho. This collection is 

 now incorporated in the herbarium at The New York Botanical Garden. 



It is therefore obvious that the Vascular Plants of the Pacific Northwest 

 (Part V, "Compositae," by Cronquist, released in 1955) wifl be one of the 

 most thoroughly documented of any modern and comparable flora. 



Field work to collect material for a flora of the Sonoran Desert was 

 begun by Ira L. Wiggins in the fall of 1932. Thirteen extensive field trips, 

 including explorations of the full length of the Peninsula of Baja California, 

 have been accomplished by Wiggins and his colleagues, Forrest Shreve, J. R. 

 McMurphy, R. C. Rollins, and others. The desert parts of Arizona, south- 

 eastern California, lower California, and Sonora have been effectively cov- 

 ered. Approximately 7000 numbers of vascular plants have been collected in 

 sets of six to twelve specimens. The first set is deposited at the Dudley 

 Herbarium; duplicates are widely distributed. 



This program has had the collaboration of an experienced taxonomist and 

 a competent ecologist who has devoted a lifetime to the study of the ecology 

 of the American desert flora. 



Shreve has already completed a book dealing with the ecological and geo- 

 graphical aspects of the Sonoran vegetation {Carnegie Inst. Wash. Pub. No. 

 591, 1951). The taxonomic treatment by Wiggins is nearing completion. 



From 1931 to 1954 Bassett Maguire and his many students and associ- 

 ciates collected extensively in the western United States from Washington, 

 Idaho, and Montana to southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico. 

 Most intensive field exploration was carried out in the high western inter- 



