HIGHLIGHTS OF BOTANICAL EXPLORATION IN THE NEW WORLD 22 1 



montane plateaus to underlie the preparation of a flora of the Intermontane 

 Region. Approximately 20,000 field numbers were assembled during this 

 period of exploration. Principal sets are at Logan, New York, Cornell, and 

 Gray. In 1942 Arthur H. Holmgren, now curator of the Intermountain Her- 

 barium at Logan, Utah, joined the program. 



Perhaps the larger part of the plant material which forms the great body 

 of specimens in the herbaria of the country has been collected by individual 

 explorers independently of any formalized program or institutional support. 

 Oftentimes the work has been carried on at great personal sacrifice, as was 

 that of Pringle, Suksdorf, Marcus E. Jones, Howell, Clokey, and many 

 others. Of this innumerable host of first-rate field investigators I shall com- 

 ment only on the work of an immediate contemporary, Rupert C. Barneby. 



For eighteen consecutive years, 1939-1956 (with the exception of 1952), 

 R. C. Barneby and H. D. Ripley, or Barneby alone, spent much or all of 

 the collecting season in western America. Each year they had carefully 

 selected objectives which their experience in the field and knowledge of the 

 literature indicated would yield interesting and profitable collecting. During 

 this period of eighteen years they amassed a total of 10,959 collection num- 

 bers. The more complete sets are deposited at the California Academy of 

 Sciences and The New York Botanical Garden. Other specimens have been 

 distributed variously in America and chiefly at Kew in Europe. 



Consistently the selection of specimens has been done with discrimination, 

 to the end that essentially all the material is of taxonomic or geographic 

 significance. Barneby has acquired a rare faculty for discovering novelties in 

 regions that have been traversed over and again by professional botanists. 

 From the Barneby-Ripley western collections there have been described sixty 

 new taxa, of which only ten are subspecific. As was to be expected, because 

 of special interest in the genus, a large percentage of the new species, in fact 

 more than half, belong to the genus Astragalm, perhaps taxonomically the 

 most complex of western genera. Barneby is today the outstanding student of 

 American Astragalus. 



III. TROPICAL AMERICA! 



Thirty-eight years before the first permanent English settlement was 

 established at Jamestown, Francisco Hernandez in 1570 saUed from Spain 

 to begin a seven-year botanical exploration of New Spain. More than two 

 hundred years were to elapse before the advent of the next famous Spanish 

 expedition to Mexico, that of Martin Sesse y Lacasta in 1788-1804 (for a 

 detailed account see "The Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain" by 



! It was intended to extend this paper to an account of exploration in temperate 

 South America. At this writing, however, that cannot be done. 



