666 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIV. No. 1141 



not attach his notes to his specimens it can 

 hardly be hoped that some other person will 

 do it for him. 



Those herbaria that are rich in original col- 

 lections should present the most data regard- 

 ing the plants themselves, yet very little atten- 

 tion is given to the eminently practicable and 

 logical procedure of recording notes with the 

 specimens in most herbaria. In almost any 

 large herbarium case after case could be cited 

 where original data regarding the plants them- 

 selves recorded on the specimen sheets, on 

 slips of paper, or in notebooks, have deliber- 

 ately been discarded either because it was not 

 recognized herbarium practise to record such 

 data, or at least to attach the data to the her- 

 barium specimen; because the ultimate value 

 of such data was not realized; because there 

 is no generally recognized place on herbarium 

 sheets for recording miscellaneous data; or 

 perhaps more often because of the time in- 

 volved in copying data from crude field notes. 

 This brings up a vital phase of the subject, and 

 that is, even if the original data be carefully 

 copied on the herbarium sheet, the original 

 notes, no matter how crude, should always be 

 attached to the sheet as a part of the record. 



Perhaps one potent reason why in ordinary 

 herbarium practise little special data is re- 

 corded with the specimen is that the average 

 herbarium label is too small on which to re- 

 cord more than a small fraction of the data 

 that might or should be recorded with the 

 specimen. In the opinion of the author the 

 conventional herbarium label is no place on 

 which to record other than the data for which 

 it was designed, the name, locality, collector 

 and date of collection. For esthetic reasons 

 many botanists are opposed to writing on the 

 herbarium sheet, and aside from the herbarium 

 label itself, there is no recognized place on the 

 sheet for recording special data. The ques- 

 tion of time and labor is also involved, for 

 under common practise special data must be 

 copied from a notebook or compiled from 

 memory. The problem of recording data with 

 the mounted specimen with the least possible 

 loss of time and labor, is solved by the adop- 

 tion of a field label. 



The urgent need of some radical change in 

 current American herbarium practise is not 

 fully realized, and in the matter of recording 

 special data on mounted botanical specimens 

 American institutions are, on the average, 

 about the same as those of other countries. 

 Fifteen years' work in systematic botany in 

 many different herbaria in the United States, 

 in Europe, in Asia and in Malaya, and my 

 own experience in establishing and building 

 up the herbarium of the Bureau of Science in 

 Manila, has led me to prepare the present 

 paper with the hope that it may lead to a 

 higher average of herbarium practise as to the 

 recording of data about the individual species. 

 To give some definite idea of the great lack of 

 special information about the plants them- 

 selves, as recorded in the average herbarium, I 

 have compiled data from 3,000 mounted her- 

 barium specimens, taken at random from three 

 types of herbaria. Care was taken in each 

 case, however, so to select the sheets that fam- 

 ilies presenting trees, shrubs, vines and herbs 

 were included. In one case not less than 75 

 per cent., and in two cases over 90 per cent, of 

 the sheets represented the original specimens, 

 that is, the first set, whenever duplicates were 

 prepared, and material primarily collected for 

 the institutions to which the herbaria belong. 

 In not a single case did the special data record 

 on any specimen exceed fifteen words on the 

 3,000 sheets examined, the average certainly 

 not exceeding five words. In separating the 

 specimens into two categories, one with special 

 data and one without, if a single word such as 

 " tree," " forests," " swamp," etc., was added 

 beside the conventional Latin name, locality, 

 collector and date of collection, the specimen 

 was placed in the group with special data. 



In a large collection assembled over the 

 course of more than forty years, the combined 

 results of the field work of many botanists and 

 collectors for the purpose of working up a 

 local flora, of 1,000 sheets examined less than 

 10 per cent, presented any data regarding the 

 plants themselves. Over 90 per cent, pre- 

 sented merely the conventional data, Latin 

 name, locality and date of collection, collector; 

 not a word regarding even the size, habitat or 



