6 DESCRIPTIVE FLORAS FOR CALIFORNIA, 1838-1880 



Survey, 1861-1875. The field botanist of the Survey, W. 11. Brewer, made eon- 

 siderable eollections from 1801 to 18()4 and was followed as botanist by II. N. 

 Bolander Avho served for several years in ways to be remembered. Brewer was the 

 first to colleet to any dep:ree in the Sierra Nevada and in many other parts of the 

 state, but he was not by inclination a botanist. The first collector of hundreds 

 and hundreds of plants never before known, he scarcely ever, perhaps never, spoke 

 of them while in California as species novae and he described as new to botanical 

 science not above four or five. 



The dried plants of the Survey were taken to Harvard University and. ampli- 

 fied by additions from numerous individual collectors, were desij^ned to furnish 

 the basis for a flora. Brewer began work in Cambridge in 1865 but his progress 

 was after several years inconsiderable. Scientifically well trained and w'ith marked 

 intellectual gifts, he was yet devoid of the qualities of mind which make a sys- 

 tematic botanist and possessed no pas,sion or even taste for systematic botany. 

 Consequently, while he struggled laboriously for several years it was to little avail. 

 Thereupon Asa Gray, able and distinguished, and Sereno Watson, competent- 

 minded though as yet with limited experience, took over the task and completed 

 and published the first volume of the Botany of the California Geological Survey 

 ill 1876. The second volume, made ready by Watson with the aid of specialists, 

 appeared in 1880. The w'hole work was basetl almost entirely on the organography 

 of the flower, fruit and leaf, with relatively little else. If one observe in the Gray 

 Herbarium the extraordinarily limited material available at that time and the 

 many California plants represented by a single insignificant or dubious scrap, the 

 achievement of the authors should be regarded as very remarkable and has only 

 occasionally been surpassed. The publication, long looked forward to with im- 

 patient eagerness by the general natural history public in California, was given a 

 felicitous welcome. The two volumes were not disappointing and yet, as explora- 

 tion of the state w'ent on and as quite new regions w^ere examined, it was soon found 

 that many more, even twice as many or more species existed, both as to plants 

 of narroAv habitat and widely distributed or abundant forms, as were described. 

 Moreover, the authors took little or no account of plant associations, zonal distribu- 

 tion or local climates. The herbarium specimen necessarily took first place in the 

 minds of both Gray and Watson, not the living plant. Both these men, to be sure, 

 had been in California. Gray was, however, unable to interest himself in field 

 work, although he sometimes collected a little as a concession to the mores of Botany. 

 It is probable that Watson never collected a single plant within the borders of 

 California. The importance of locality, that is the place w^liere the specimen was 

 collected, where the living plant grows, with its extraordinary significance in rela- 

 tion to associated species, topography, altitude, exposure, local climate and other 

 considerations, such as habit and biological factors, exerted comparatively little 

 influence upon these men in connection with their study of herbarium specimens. 

 The range of a species as expressed in general terms was in that day considered 

 important, but less was thought of definite localities. Gray as well as Watson dis- 

 tributed duplicates of the dried plants of Brewer and other collectors to European 

 herbaria without locality, although the original label bore a locality. Neither 

 Gray nor Watson had any prophetic sense of the richness of the vegetation, its 

 highly localized character or degree of differentiation, or of the development 

 within various genera of species swarms. As early as 1870 Gray wa*ote to a far 

 western correspondent, ''Send me a full set of all [your] plants. I hope you may 

 find some new things but you will have to look sharp if you do." Yet to each suc- 

 cessive consignment of wholly new materials from western America Gray gave 

 order and arrangement that Avere a tribute to his native powers. 



After Gray's death Edward Lee Greene published four numbers of his Flora 

 Franciscana (1891-1897). This flora was done by a man of scholarly parts who, 



