July 24, 1969 
Dear Jarufe: 
The enclosed summary was compiled from Bob Long's field notes and from the botany 
files in your office. It was made in anticipation of your Honoulu visit. A copy will 
be sent to Dick G ro ssin. 
I learned very quickly that the botany material must be used with caution because 
of inconsistancies galore. A good example of this is Hull Island. In his listing of 
vascular plants for Hull Bob listed 23 species and annotated them. Then, however, in 
the general descriptive narrative for Hull he mentions 8 additional species that have 
occurred at one time or another. This apparently was just carelessness or haste perhaps. 
A person using only the list of vascular plants and assuming it was complete would leave 
of(one-quarter of the plants collected from the island. This can be corrected if one 
has both the list and the narrative but what do you do if you onjy have the list - you're 
up the creek, theh. For Gardner Island I found three additional species mentioned in 
the literature - none mentioned in either the list or in the narrative. I'd be out of 
luck if I hadn't been on these islands. 
This list shows we lack quite a bit of material particularly field notes and 
collection notes but also a number of the island histories (if they were in fact 
written). If you will notice in the column "Field Numbers Used" all those preceeded 
by "ca." are approximations I figured out by checking his annotated lists of vascular 
plants and recording highest and lowest catalog numbers. We have no complete list 
of soil samples he took on the various islands. He also took water samples from many, 
if not all of the lagoons, and these were checked for salinity - we should kfaow what 
these were (I have seen a few of these on a listing and Bob uses a salinity ocassionally 
in his narratives). He ran plant quadrat studies on islands other than Howland we 
should have some idea regarding the results of these. It would also be of some value 
to know the identification of the various algae he collected - and who has these samples 
now. 
j At the present time Roger and ,1 have an interest in any material dealing with 
Sydney, Garaner, Hull, Birnie, Malden and Starbuck Islands. Nevertheless, it wouldn't 
hurt for us to get copies of everything out there that looks interesting. 
We are moving along slowly with the writing. Sydney iw about 90% complete at this 
moment. Histories have been roughed out for Gardner and >klden and the vegetation 
section and an island description completed for Gardner. I'm now setting up for a 
description of Malden and then the plants of Malden and Starbuck before writing the 
history for the later. As I write the history section & plants & physical description 
Roger knocks out the species accounts. We then switch off and re-write and check for 
accuracy. Seems to work fairly well. We are constantly getting bogged down with data 
lapses and spend a good deal of time running down the source of inconsistencies, etc. 
I have marked those places where we are missing data. I understand that Lamoureux 
is responsible for writing up reports on vegetation for the Leewards so wouldn't spend 
much time on this. If you could devote some time to the Phoenix & Line islands, espec. 
thosd 6 mentioned above it would certainly help. 
The astronauts on Apollo 11 just splashed down on the edge of the northern grid 
which caused a certain amount of commotion around here. We had visions of the thing 
coming down right in the middle of a feeding flock of Sooty Terns and landing in the 
water mnnn in a cloud of bird feathers and then floating around with orange streamers 
hanging all over it. So much for today's levity. 
Hope all is progressing well. Look this thing over and see if you can decipher it 
if not give me a buz* before heading to Hono. Regards, 
Ut> 6 
