Cannabis sattwva or had modified in 1754 the generic de- 
scription of Cannabis published in 1737 on the basis of 
later material—as he did for some other species and 
genera—then it would be judicious to select a lectotype 
from this material influencing his final concept of these. 
In fact, however, he did neither. Hence, as indicated 
above, the lectotype has to be taken from the earlier 
material on which his unchanged concepts were based. 
From this standpoint, the two specimens under Cannabis 
in his herbarium at the Linnean Society of London have 
only a subsidiary relevance, because they in no way af- 
fected his publications. They are, however, of interest 
on account of their Linnaean association. Linnaean Her- 
barium specimen 1117.2, illustrated in Joyce & Curry, 
Botany and Chemistry of Cannabis 22 (1970), is a pistil- 
late plant, with fewer than the usual number of leaflets, 
which are narrowly lanceolate, long acuminate and sharp- 
ly serrate. It has no epithet but is numbered ‘1’ in Lin- 
naeus s hand. 
Linnaeus began to draft his Species Plantarum long 
before he devised his method of consistent binomial no- 
menclature for species; even in 1748, he had not devised 
binomials for the whole vegetable kingdom; hence the 
most convenient method of arranging and designating 
his herbarium specimens was to number the species in 
each folder according to the numbered species entries in 
his manuscript Species Plantarum. \WWhen, a few years 
after 1753, he began to prepare a second edition of the 
Species Plantarum, with changed numbering of specific 
entries, he ceased to number his specimens but added 
instead the specific epithet introduced in that work. 
Thus, a numeral corresponding to an entry in the first 
edition of the Species Plantarum is a valuable indication 
that Linnaeus possessed this specimen in 1758 or ac- 
quired it soon afterwards. 
