Medical Comments on the Specimens of Joseph Lord

Kara deGroote, a student in the MayX course at Furman University, has compiled a medical commentary on the specimens of Joseph Lord. Joseph Lord was sent to Dorchester, South Carolina, in the early 1700s as the leader of a new colony (you can read more about him here.)

Joseph Lord sent his botanical specimens back to England to Joseph Pettiver. Since Pettiver was an apothecary, it is not surprising that Lord’s specimens emphasized plants that had, or were believed to have had, medical uses.

deGroote’s commentary is a CITE Collection on GitHub.

Did dinosaurs invent termites?

Jurassic cockroaches ate lots of dinosaur dung. Scientists have actually found fossilized cockroach feces that contain bits of wood that had already been partially digested by dinosaurs.

Termites, social insects famed for wood-eating ability, are the direct descendants of cockroaches. But termites don’t exactly digest wood themselves. Instead, microorganisms in their guts break it down for them. They keep their guts full of essential microbes by (ahem) eating one another’s feces.

Dinosaurs are known to have eaten rotting wood that was already broken down by fungi. They processed their food for a long time, churning it in their stomachs where they also kept collections of microbes that did much of the digestion for them. Some of these microbes and fungi came out in their feces. Young dinosaurs probably got their own digestive microbes by eating adult dinosaur feces.

Cockroaches that ate the feces would have also eaten those microbes. After millions of years, those cockroaches best able to incorporate dinosaur wood-digesting microbes into their own personal microbiomes would have thrived, at the expense of less successful roaches; the successful ones thus evolved into termites.

Arse weed des Américains

In volume 8 of the Michaux Herbarium lies this lovely specimen, which Michaux called Polygonum hydropiper. That species name is no longer recognized by ITIS and has been replaced by the name Persicaria hydropiper though the USDA sticks with Polygonum hydropiper. I'm not making any declarations as to whether that is the exact determination of this specimen; we're nowhere near volume 8 yet.

What interests me is this note up at the top right corner of the page:



Apparently the plant is very peppery, hence the specific name "water pepper." It was found in Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and Illinois - that's easy. But that last line?

"Arse weed des Américains" is one of the more evocative phrases I've encountered in these specimens. What on earth can it mean?

Googling the term first results in a bunch of hits from cannabis growers. There's this rather bizarre blog account, which I hesitate to credit. This plant name book provides a list of common names for P. hydropiper, which include Arse-smart and Arsenick.  Merriam Webster confirms the Arsesmart usage for this species. It's apparently a synonym for Smartweed, which is another popular common name for P. hydropiper.

Which brings us to the reason for the name, courtesy of WebMD: Smartweed, or arsesmart, scientifically known as Polygonum hydropiper, is a plant widely used as a medicine for bleeding hemorrhoids. It's also used to treat uterine bleeding and diarrhea. The plant contains large amounts of vitamin K, which help blood to clot. The active ingredient is known as polygonic acid. It was of interest to pharmacists in the 19th century. Researchers in Bangladesh have recently proven that the plant does have antibacterial properties, validating its use in traditional medicine.

Michaux, here we go!

Patrick and I have finally started pawing through the Michaux specimens to make modern determinations. It's going to take us a while.

We've got nearly 3000 images in the collection, all from the Michaux Herbarium at the Jardin des Plantes. They're organized into 21 volumes. Each volume is divided into two parts. Each part - each folder in the herbarium - contains between 90 and 110 specimen sheets. They've already mostly been organized, but according to Linnaean taxonomy, and though many of them have sort of modern determinations, we have to double check them all. Some names have changed. ITIS is invaluable for keeping up with the twists and turns of nomenclature. (Thank you, federal government!)

At some point, I need to get the barcodes off the specimens into my database. Then we'll totally have our data linked to the physical specimens, and it will be possible to conclusively say which of our determinations goes with which dried plant on paper.

So, volume one - it starts with Plantaginaceae, the plantain family that includes some waterweeds, pulls in some Oleaceae, back to Plantaginaceae, into Acanthaceae, a few of the Lentibulariaceae, and then plunges into the massive mint family, Lamiaceae. Why mixed up like that? Because the Linnaean classification system groups most of this mass - almost everything in Volume 1, except for the first few - into Diandria Monogynia. By Michaux's lights, all of these plants were in the same family.

We've already found a bunch of Eurasian plants - more on that anon, as I organize the data further. We found a specimen of Dicliptera sexangularis (1:30), commonly called sixangle foldwing, which only occurs in Florida. Presumably Michaux collected it during his voyages in Florida, which I hope to learn about from the book André Michaux in Florida.

Clearly I'm also going to have to read Michaux's diary in some loving detail; an English translation is online, but I need to find the French one. The specimens come from all over the place - Trois Rivières in Canada, Hudson Bay, Lake Mistassini, Carolina, Kentucky, presumably Florida. It must have been an adventure collecting them all!

Algae, sea urchins, introduced pathogens

Here's a story of small things making big differences.

First, we have the long-spined sea urchin, Diadema antillarum. These little guys look like pincushions stuck full of porcupine spines. They are echinoderms, like starfish, distinguished by radial symmetry and a marine lifestyle. Their ancestors first appeared in the Cambrian period, 541 to 485 million years ago. They have no heads, and just a single hole on their undersides that serves as a mouth. They move around the ocean floor on little tube feet, which can propel them with astonishing speed when they feel threatened. They eat algae, vast amounts of algae.

Now, algae. Algae are not plants, though they are autotrophs that conduct photosynthesis. They are at least eukaryotes, organisms with membrane-bound organelles. The algae aren't really a true taxonomic grouping, because there are many different types and not all of them share a common ancestor. (Like slime molds and water molds, algae are now taxa without a kingdom. They just get a domain, Eukarya.) Green algaes do look like plants, and so we sometimes call them seaweed.

Algae are ubiquitous in the seas around the Bahamas. So are coral. For millenia (eons?), algae populations on coral reefs by animals that ate them. Parrotfish eat some algae off the coral, along with some of the coral, but sea urchins are the real stars. They're little vegetarian (algaetarian?) vacuum cleaners that spend their nights gorging on new algal growth on coral reefs, and their days hiding in cavities within the coral. It keeps the urchins happy and the coral clean and beautiful.

(Parrotfish start off life as females and then turn into males. Scientists call them sequential hermaphrodites.)

Third character: a pathogen. No one knows what kind, bacteria or virus or fungus. In any case, a pathogen is a disease-causing organism.  In 1983 a pathogen entered the Atlantic through the Panama Canal, perhaps in the ballast water of a cargo ship. It was deadly to sea urchins and spread rapidly through the water. Within a year, some 97 percent of the Diadema from South America to the Bahamas had died. 

The resulting algae growth on the coral was entirely predictable and unstoppable. Today Caribbean reefs look like shaggy green monsters.

Various organizations have been working to correct this situation. Some have been breeding sea urchins and restoring them to habitats. Others have been collecting urchins from the few places they still live and moving them to algae-covered reefs.

Blackbeard's Cruises and the Cat Ppalu have been conducting Diadema restoration trips for around a decade. I went on one of these trips with the Cat Ppalu back in 2005. It was hard work! We went out every night to free dive for urchins, brought them back to the boat, and then delivered them to their new homes that day. Urchins hide in daylight, which makes them nearly impossible to catch without seriously damaging them, so it has to be done by darkness, when they walk around the sandy bottom. The idea is to create a critical mass of adult urchins so that they're close enough to one another to breed successfully - they do that echinoderm thing of everyone spawning at once one very special night each year.

Reportedly these efforts have been paying off, and some reefs with restored urchins are looking cleaner. I'll get to see next week because I'm heading off to do another urchin restoration week on the Cat Ppalu.

Living Fossils Everywhere

The ginkgo is often described as a "living fossil." But what the heck does that mean?

Charles Darwin coined the term in On the Origin of Species in reference to the platypus. Discover Online suggests that living fossils are animals (sic) that have remained relatively unchanged since they first evolved - like the platypus. The coelacanth is famously called a living fossil, though Smithsonian notes that it's more living than fossil.

Darwin suggested that these archaic forms somehow are immune to the ravages of natural selection, surviving when their compatriots go extinct due to inhabiting a protected niche without much competition. Without pressures that affect survival, there is little incentive to evolve much.

I like Darwin, and think he had great ideas. I think the term "living fossil," though, is overused and a little silly, because fossils aren't living and the experience of living long after an evolutionary starting date is hardly rare or unique. Brian Switek has a great blog posting at Wired on this very topic, entitled "Unless they're zombies, fossils don't live."

Organisms that meet the definition of living fossil are absolutely everywhere. Almost every single plant species should qualify. The various plant families originated in the antedeluvian past, some long before dinosaurs. See a moss or fern lately? A magnolia? A crazy sago palm?

The ginkgo gets star billing because it had faded out of human view for millennia, only to be revived by adventurous botanists in the 1700s and then discovered for what it was by a Japanese botanist with a microscope in 1896. Lo and behold, it was found to have exceedingly archaic sperm, characteristic of very primitive plants. Turns out that our current landscape species, Ginkgo biloba, first hit the scene about 56 million years ago. Its genus appeared 170 million years ago, in the Jurassic - dinosaur central. Its order appeared in the Permian, before the horrendous end-Permian extinction - ginkgoes made it through that bottleneck.

So the ginkgo is a special case. But plants everywhere have been around for ages and ages, way more than our paltry 200,000 years. Even the most recently evolved families, such as the Asteraceae and Fabaceae and Poaceae, are millions and millions of years old. You can look at any landscape and view snapshots from the history of life on earth. So what's a living fossil? Either all of them, or none of them.

Linnaean Taxonomy and Finding Oconee Bells

Linnaeus was the father of taxonomy, but his taxonomy was not our taxonomy. I had never given this concept much thought until Chris, Patrick and I got into the Michaux collections at the Jardin des Plantes this summer.

We photographed nearly 2900 specimens in this collection. They are carefully organized on their shelves in volumes and folders. The volumes are organized by Linnaean classes, the classification scheme Michaux used for his Flora Boreali Americana. Within those classes there are subdivisions by orders (I think they're orders), which are marked by bits of paper stuck in between folders. The genera are contained in individual manila folders, which can contain numerous specimens.

Linnaeus organized plants by numbers of sexual parts - nine male one female, five male three female - that kind of thing. That means his organizational scheme is NOT AT ALL the same as currently used schema (even allowing for the fact that taxonomy is currently in flux, and people are using all kinds of systems to organize their herbaria - Cronquist is still around, though the latest greatest is the APG III scheme, and it's pretty darn different.) Linnaean taxonomy is VERY different.

How different? Very very different. So different that Pinaceae, Cupressaceae, and Euphorbiaceae are in the same category - Monoecia Monadelphia. Gymnosperms grouped with eudicots is decidedly not what we do today.

This makes finding individual specimens a challenge. Say you want to find the specimen of Shortia galacifolia, the famous Oconee bells - a pretty important specimen in Michaux lore.

Oconee bells at South Carolina Botanical Garden

To find this in a modern herbarium, you'd figure out what family contains Shortia and then flip through the folders until you came upon Shortia. There it would be.

But Michaux didn't call this plant Shortia. He called it ... what? No one knew. We looked up the genus on the Jardin's database, but that was no help. So we were sort of stuck - didn't even know how to look it up.

We only found the darn thing because Chris and I photographed EVERY specimen in the Michaux collection. That is why, in the midst of Volume 9, we discovered a photocopy of the Shortia specimen, in the genus Pyrola.

Of course! Pyrola! Duh!

Never heard of it....

Finding the specimen then required following the photocopied clue into the Jussieu materials, where the thing had been refiled for safekeeping or something. (Jussieu 7545 is what you want if you go there.)

I've cataloged the Michaux images now according to volume, genus, and family. I discovered - after the fact, so now I am considerably more clued in than I was at the start of this project - that the herbarium is in fact very carefully organized according to this book. The first specimen in both is Hippuris, and it goes from there.

Once we get all this data together - there's so much! - it will be fascinating to put Linnaean classifications and modern families side by side to see how much they overlap. They do in many cases, just not all.

And my efforts have already proven useful to me. I wanted to find Linnaeus' description of Clethra in his Species Plantarum so that I could quote him for an article. But how to find Clethra? Well, I just pulled up my handy Michaux database in Bento (the late, lamented - how could you ditch us all, Filemaker?) and there it was - Decandria Monogynia, of course. (Ten men, one woman....)

That's what I'd figured....

Data, Tools, & Views

After a busy summer of development, we have online a new web application dedicated to Botanica Caroliniana’s data. This is a customized implementation of CITE/CTS Services, which we have developed in collaboration with the Homer Multitext.

With this in place, we are looking forward to more rapidly putting into place interesting and useful views of the growing body of data. For example, this page is a view of the specimens of Mark Catesby (and images of them) organized by (modern) Family and Genus. We are working to index the specimens of the other 18th century collectors so they will appear in this list as well.

All images remain downloadable directly from the project’s data archive. Data collections, XML texts, and indices are always freely available from the project’s GitHub site.

The CITE architecture provides many different ways of discovering, accessing, reproducing, and using the images, texts, and other data available on this site. We will follow up, on this blog, with more specific tutorials for accessing this data through the CITE/CTS service over the coming weeks.

Type Specimens

A type specimen is an example of an organism or thing that is the ultimate defining example for its category. Any time a scientist creates a scientific name - which means he or she has identified a species, genus, family, or some other taxonomic group that is distinct from all other related groups - that scientist must also choose a type specimen. The type should contain all the distinguishing characteristics of its taxon so it can serve as a reference and comparison for other scientists.

Except that's not strictly true. Really types have most to do with nomenclature - you can't have a valid scientific name without at least one actual object that holds that name.

Naming types is governed by strict rules. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature sets rules for naming animal types. An animal type can be an animal, a part of an animal, the work of an animal (fossilized footprints, wasps' nests if built before 1931), a colony, or a microscope slide. A photograph CANNOT serve as a type. Bacteria have their own nomenclatural code, which used to include rules for fungi. Fungi are now part of the exciting International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. Obviously, so are plants.

I can only imagine how much fun it must be to attend the meetings that arrive at these codes.

The International Code gives use rules for typification. These rules are ... complex.

The different types of types are especially complicated. The most basic include:

1. Holotype, which is the main type designated by the author of the name.
2. Isotype, which is a duplicate of a type. Say, the author collects two specimens on the same day at the same place and designates the best one as the holotype - the other one can be an isotype.
3. Lectotype, a specimen - or illustration - created at the time that the name was created if the author didn't name a holotype at that time.
4. Neotype, a type chosen after the fact if there is no holotype or other original material.
5. Epitype, a type chosen to clarify an ambiguous holotype or lectotype.

There are others.

To designate plant types, botanists publish descriptions in the journal Taxon, which specializes in this field. Before Taxon was founded in 1951, botanists published these descriptions ... well, I don't really know. This is an area of plant taxonomy that I have always found opaque. How is it that botanists can keep track of these things, the designations of names and specimens and changes? Where do these types live? Anywhere? If so, how does anyone get to see them?

The Index Kewensis has kept up with nomenclature since 1885. This work continues with the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), which is trying to eliminate the need to consult umpteen primary sources. The Linnaean Plant Name Typification Project has been finding and digitizing the type specimens Linnaeus used for his names. Even so, botanical nomenclature and typification seems to assume a vast amount of pre-existing knowledge, and an inordinate attention to botanists, some of whom are so well-known they go by obscure abbreviations. If you don't already know the prevailing practices in this field, it's fairly hard to figure them out on your own. And it's very easy to get stuff wrong.

It's almost like practicing law.

Plants on the Art Loeb Trail - and barefoot shoes!

We hiked the Art Loeb Trail over Labor Day weekend - Chris, me, and our two kids. We did it in two days, mainly because no one felt like camping out two nights.

We spent Friday night in Brevard so that we could catch the 6 a.m. shuttle run by Pura Vida Adventures. That way we could do the trip with just one car, which we left in Brevard at the Davidson River Campground. The shuttle dropped us off at Camp Daniel Boone so we could hike the trail north to south. This is the easier direction because the majority of the altitude gain happens all at once at the beginning, on the hike up to Cold Mountain. As we proceeded down the route, I felt increasingly sorry for the poor souls hiking in the other direction.

This walk took us through an incredible variety of plant communities. I will confess that though I initially regretted that I hadn't brought any collection gear with me, I soon lost the energy to think about plant identification beyond an idle appreciation of what grew on the sides of the trail. But it did make me think of my friends André, Mark, John, and Joseph - up in the wilderness, it's possible to see some of what they saw.

On our first high ridge, between Deep Gap and Shining Rock, we walked through fields of Ageratina altissima, common white snakeroot, and endless nettles, Laportea canadensis. The nettles sting. We saw chestnut oak, Quercus montana, and American chestnut, Castanea dentata. In places the ground was thick with shiny green Galax ureceolata.

The area between Shinking Rock and Black Balsam Knob is awash in blueberries, Vaccinium corymbosum. One year Chris and I gorged on them like black bears; this year we just nibbled as we walked, though we saw plenty of collectors armed with plastic containers. We also saw lots of black bear scat - on the trail! - laden with blueberry bits.

Just south of the Blue Ridge Parkway we entered a quiet, soft-grounded forest of spruce and fir. Patrick finds these areas sadly devoid of diversity, but we've always found the ambiance pleasant, somewhat Middle-Earth-like. We camped in a grove of what I seem to recall as sycamores and tulip poplars, but I might have been insane after 15 miles of hiking, and it was both dark and pouring down rain, so all I can recollect is the wind that blew up amongst the broad leaves - broad leaves and a high thick canopy that actually stopped much of the rain from reaching us. At first.

The next morning we climbed Pilot Mountain, home to more Castanea and endless rhododendrons and mountain laurels.

As we descended toward Brevard we saw more of those, plus numerous Magnolia fraseri. It was like dinosaur land. We were set upon by a nest of yellow jackets tiptoeing through a rhododendron thicket near Butter Gap. The climate grew warmer and more jungly as we approached Brevard.

What else did we see? Trilliums with dried flowers still attached. Goldenrods. Some sort of Lysimachia? Red oaks and white oaks. Pines. Tulip poplars. Red maples. Lots and lots of other things I can't recall. It wasn't the trip for collecting or taking notes.

Biggest breakthrough: Chris and I both hiked the whole thing in Merrell Barefoot shoes. I wore the Pace Glove, no socks, and he wore the Vapor Glove with thick wool socks. It was great! We had no blisters, and the groundfeel was wonderful. We've been doing the minimalist thing for several years now so our feet must be pretty strong, but still, it was a revelation to see what our own feet are capable of. Allowed complete freedom they do a great job of walking - way better than heavy cast-like hiking boots. No more boots for me!

We also ate what I think of as a more genuinely paleo diet than the currently popular silliness, all dried fruits and nuts and a small amount of beef jerky. Plus some tortillas with peanut butter. No stove, no camping food. That is also the way to go - lots of energy, low bulk, and very little trash.

André Michaux

This July, Chris, Patrick, and I traveled to Europe with the generous support of the Andrew Mellon Foundation. We tried to make good use of our time. In London we gave talks at the British Library and the Natural History Museum and met with colleagues at RBG Kew. We spent the weekend in Hamburg, getting to know colleagues at the Botanischer Garten there - a wonderful weekend! Then we hopped over to Paris and spent several days at the Jardin des Plantes, examining the entire Michaux herbarium. I have a whole series of things to blog about that, only awaiting the posting of the images, but I will begin today with just a bit about Michaux.

André Michaux was born in Versailles in 1746. Versailles has extensive and fabulous gardens - if you wanted to learn about plants and gardens, 18th-century Versailles might just have been the perfect place to be born. (Elizabeth Gilbert presents a similar character raised near Kew in one of my favorite books, The Signature of All Things.)

He studied with Bernard de Jussieu, a botanist who created his own system of classification that he employed in the design of the Trianon gardens at Versailles and whose name lingers on University of Paris VI and its accompanying Metro stop.

Michaux got himself appointed government botanist, of all things. After an exciting botanical mission to Persia, the French government sent him to the brand spanking new United States in 1785. His mission? It was the same as all of those guys - find plants that might be useful. In France's case, they particularly wanted some good oaks, having cut down all their own forests and being in need of ships in which to fight the British.

Michaux spent ten years in America. He set up a home base near Charleston, where he planted a botanical garden. He explored up and down the east coast and well into Kentucky and Ohio. (Charlie Williams and Michaux.org have posted timelines of Michaux's activities, as well as more biographical information.) He collected thousands of plant specimens, nearly 3000 of which are in the Herbier Michaux in Paris. His son worked with him some of the time.

If you look at the years Michaux spent in the U.S. - 1785 to 1796 - and think about your history, you will realize that this period spanned one of the most unstable epochs in French history. The French Revolution of 1789 caused some real problems for Michaux, who had received his salary from the crown. Once there was no more crown, there was no more salary. So Michaux, like many scholars and academics, had to scramble for money. He applied for the job that eventually went to Lewis and Clark - almost got it, too. He finally went back to France, failed to collect his back salary, and resigned himself to organizing his herbarium and writing his books, the Flora Boreali-Americana and the Histoire des Chênes de l'Amerique. Both were published after Michaux died in Madagascar in 1800.

Patrick and I have been working on a master list of all the Michaux specimens. Many of these include notes on habitat and other tidbits, in Latin and French. They're organized according to Linnaean taxonomy, which bears no relation to the current APG system. The collection contains hundreds of specimens marked as types. So there's a lot to explore!

Crowdsourcing Taxonomy

Crowdsourcing is an old idea. All of the plants in Botanica Caroliniana are the result of a large effort to crowdsource taxonomy.

James Petiver (1665-1718) was an apothecary in London. Petiver was a member of the Royal Society and a collector - of all sorts of things. Except for a brief period studying entomology in the Netherlands, Petiver worked in London. He kept a shop "at the sign of the white cross in Aldersgate, London."

Somehow Petiver got into the business of collecting natural history specimens, especially insects and plants. Ships were visiting all parts of the world, and Mr. Petiver and his friends evidently had an insatiable appetite for the curiosities they might bring back. So he started printing pamphlets asking for contributions to his collections, with explicit directions for collectors to follow for collecting and storing herbarium specimens. The collectors - Lord, Lawson - would package up their materials and send them to London when they could. Petiver then organized them according to some taxonomic scheme - if you look at the order of Lord's specimens, they are pretty much arranged by current families - and bound them in books.  By the time he died in 1718, Petiver had the largest collection of dried plants in the world.

Hans Sloane (1660 - 1753) jumped on this opportunity, purchasing Petiver's collections and many others, which eventually became the basis of the Natural History Museum, London. Sloane himself spent some time in Jamaica and is famous for his descriptions of Jamaican natural history, but the vast majority of his collection - some 120,000 specimens - came from people he never met and places he never visited. Catesby was one of his contributors. William Sherard (1659 - 1728), another of Catesby's sponsors, was doing much the same thing in Oxford.

The big man himself, Carolus Linnaeus, used this same business model. His travels were mostly restricted to places close by - Lapland, central Sweden, the Netherlands - and he did most of his work from his comfortable facilities in Uppsala. To fill his coffers, he sent his students on voyages of discovery. Daniel Solander and another student traveled around the world with Captain Cook. Others visited Japan, the Americas, Australia, and anyplace else they could reach. The ones who survived gave their specimens to Linnaeus, who worked them into his Systema Naturae.

Why do it this way? Well, for one thing, traveling was dangerous. Lots of Linnaeus' students died on their journeys, cutting short their aspirations for scientific discovery.

But more practically, you can't do two big things at once. Exploring and collecting specimens is one job. Assembling a collection is another. To make a collection, you have to be physically present at your research site, and you are encumbered by lots of stuff - camping gear, the specimens themselves. You can visit only a restricted area, and you might have to visit that area repeatedly to catch your subjects in bloom.

Assembling a collection, on the other hand, requires peace and quiet, a large flat surface and a roof overhead, lots of paper and glue, and reference materials. It's not easily done in the field. More importantly, a good collection requires a large body of specimens. Specimens from multiple collectors can offer perspective that the work of a single collector cannot. If you want to organize the world's plants, you need lots of contributors in lots of different places. You want to see the big picture.

This is how crowdsourcing works today. Project Budburst, the Great Backyard Bird Count, and NASA's Disk Detective program (sorting out stars with disks from nebulae and galaxies) all use non-scientist volunteers to collect and process data. The professional scientists then process what the citizen scientists send them, and the result is much better than they could achieve trying to gather data alone.

Like our historic collectors, today's citizen scientists are motivated by a desire to be part of something bigger - to make a contribution to science and maybe learn a little more science themselves. Lord and Lawson collected for Petiver out of interest in the world around them and the hope that what they saw might be of use - and as a way of making contact with London intellectual life, in short supply in the Carolinas in 1700. And their contributions did turn out to be real, useful both to the botanists creating modern taxonomy and to those of us studying them today.

Winchester Wedding

In A New Voyage to Carolina, John Lawson records this scene:

 

Tuesday.

        Next Morning we set out early, breaking the Ice we met withal, in the stony Runs, which were many. We pass'd by several Cottages, and about 8 of the Clock came to a pretty big Town, where we took up our Quarters, in one of their State Houses, the Men being all out, hunting in the Woods, and none but Women at home. Our Fellow Traveller of whom I spoke before at the Congerees, having a great Mind for an Indian Lass, for his Bed-Fellow that Night,

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Page 41 spoke to our Guide, who soon got a Couple, reserving one for himself. That which fell to our Companion's Share, was a pretty young Girl. Tho' they could not understand one Word of what each other spoke, yet the Female Indian, being no Novice at her Game, but understanding what she came thither for, acted her Part dexterously enough with her Cully, to make him sensible of what she wanted; which was to pay the Hire, before he rode the Hackney. He shew'd her all the Treasure he was possess'd of, as Beads, Red Cadis, &c. which she lik'd very well, and permitted him to put them into his Pocket again, endearing him with all the Charms, which one of a better Education than Dame Nature had Bestow'd upon her, could have made use of, to render her Consort a surer Captive. After they had us'd this Sort of Courtship a small time, the Match was confirm'd by both Parties, with the Approbation of as many Indian Women, as came to the House, to celebrate our Winchester-Wedding. Every one of the Bride-Maids were as great Whores, as Mrs. Bride, tho' not quite so handsome. Our happy Couple went to Bed together before us all, and with as little Blushing, as if they had been Man and Wife for 7 Years. The rest of the Company being weary with travelling, had more Mind to take their Rest, than add more Weddings to that hopeful one already consummated; so that tho' the other Virgins offer'd their Service to us, we gave them their Answer, and went to sleep. About an Hour before day, I awak'd, and saw somebody walking up and down the Room in a seemingly deep Melancholy. I call'd out to know who it was, and it prov'd to be Mr. Bridegroom, who in less than 12 Hours, was Batchelor, Husband, and Widdower, his dear Spouse having pick'd his Pocket of the Beads, Cadis, and what else should have gratified the Indians for the Victuals we receiv'd of them. However that did not serve her turn,but she had also got his Shooes away, which he had made the Night before, of a drest Buck-Skin. Thus dearly did our Spark already repent his new Bargain, walking bare-foot, in his Penitentials, like some poor Pilgrim to Loretto.        After the Indians had laugh'd their Sides sore at the Figure Mr. Bridegroom made, with much ado, we muster'd up another Pair of Shooes, or Moggisons, and set forward on our intended Voyage, the Company (all the way) lifting up their

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Page 42 Prayers for the new married Couple, whose Wedding had made away with that, which should have purchas'd our Food.

Stole his shoes! That's cold!

This story seems to be a popular one. I've found it in this blog and mentioned in this book on humor and the American Indian. The author of the essay in question suggests that portrays himself and his fellow European explorers as the greenhorn butt of jokes, and the Winchester Wedding as a big joke by the Indians on the whole expedition.

So what is a "Winchester Wedding"? Just what it looks like, apparently - a hookup. The term appears in broadside ballads from the time. Lawson wrote more on the subject of Indians and Winchester Weddings in a description of Indian women (scroll down a bit; these pages are undifferentiated, so the links aren't that useful):

"As for the Indian Women, which now happen in my Way; when young, and at Maturity, they are as fine-shap'd Creatures (take them generally) as any in the Universe. They are of a tawny Complexion; their Eyes very brisk and amorous; their Smiles afford the finest Composure a Face can possess, their Hands are of the finest Make, with small long Fingers, and as soft as their Cheeks, and their whole Bodies of a smooth Nature. They are not so uncouth or unlikely, as we suppose them; nor are they Strangers or not Proficients in the soft Passion. They are most of them mercenary, except the married Women, who sometimes bestow their Favours also to some or other, in their Husbands Absence. For which they never ask any Reward.
As for the Report, that they are never found unconstant, like the Europeans, it is wholly false; for were the old World and the new one put into a Pair of Scales (in point of Constancy) it would be a hard Matter to discern which was the heavier. As for the Trading Girls, which are those design'd to get Money by their Natural Parts, these are discernable, by the Cut of their Hair; their Tonsure differing from all others, of that Nation, who are not of their Profession; which Method is intended to prevent Mistakes; for the Savages of America are desirous (if possible) to keep their Wives to themselves, as well as those in other Parts of the World. When any Addresses are made to one of these Girls, she immediately acquaints her Parents therewith, and they tell the King of it, (provided he that courts her be a Stranger) his Majesty commonly being the principal Bawd of the Nation he rules over, and there seldom being any of these Winchester-Weddings agreed on, without his Royal Consent. He likewise advises her what Bargain to make, and if it happens to be an Indian Trader that wants a Bed-fellow, and has got Rum to sell, be sure, the King must have a large Dram for a Fee, to confirm the Match. These Indians, that are of the elder sort, when any such Question is put to them, will debate the Matter amongst themselves with all the Sobriety and Seriousness imaginable, every one of the Girl's Relations arguing the Advantage or Detriment that may ensue such a Night's Encounter; all which is done with as much Steadiness and Reality, as if it was the greatest Concern in the World, and not so much as one Person shall be seen to smile, so long as the Debate holds, making no Difference betwixt an Agreement of this Nature, and a Bargain of any other.
If they comply with the Men's Desire, then a particular Bed is provided for them, either in a Cabin by themselves, or else all the young people turn out, to another Lodging, that they may not spoil Sport; and if the old People are in the same Cabin along with them all Night, they lie as unconcern'd, as if they were so many Logs of Wood. If it be an Indian of their own Town or Neighbourhood, that wants a Mistress, he comes to none but the Girl, who receives what she thinks fit to ask him, and so lies all Night with him, without the Consent of her Parents."

Spontaneous trefoil?

On the lower left of HS 242 f. 110, one of Lawson's collections, is a label covering what appears to be a plant specimen. It's quite small, and the bit that appears most clearly looks like a trifoliate something-or-other. A Desmodium, perhaps? Who knows. Weakley includes the common name "trefoil" in eight different plant entries - anything with leaves clumped in threes can merit it.

The intriguing thing is the label, which is evocative. (At least, my attempt at deciphering it is evocative.) It appears to read:

"Jan. 27th 1710. Spontaneous [?] trefoil of Carolina growing on the fork of Neus River and in other places having shed [?] from flower like drops of blood a sweet herbage[??] all spontaneous trefoils are more hairy here than in England."

I may have gotten that completely wrong.

But what if I'm right, and it does refer to "spontaneous trefoil"? Did people believe plants could grow spontaneously? Is trefoil a particular weed, common in England?

I found this account in The Farmer's Magazine, London 1851 (MDCCCLI - I hate Roman numerals!) describing a case of trefoil growing in fields sown with clover. Because the seed produced pure clover in most fields, the farmers concluded that the trefoil must have grown spontaneously. The author refuses to believe this, noting that seeds could lie dormant for years until conditions were right for them to germinate, but it is intriguing, no?

Then there's this, from the Annals of Agriculture, and Other Useful Arts, published London 1804: "Gypsum has also another very singular property, that of encouraging the growth of spontaneous trefoil on spots where seed had never been sown, particularly of the yellow and white trefoil. In Alsace I have seen many instances of this singular circumstance."

And this, on the adulteration of forage plants, another author recognizing that yellow trefoil seeds can last a long time.

What is trefoil? I'm not going to attempt to identify this specimen, but I can speculate more on my musings. This UK lawn weed site identifies Trifolium dubium as the noxious weed Lesser Trefoil - it's a Eurasian native, and is introduced to our area, so maybe not that. Plant Guide.org identifies it as Medicago lupulina, also introduced to our area. Weakley includes the common name "trefoil" in eight different plant entries - anything with leaves clumped in threes can merit it.

Sadly, our photographs do not allow us to see through that unfortunate label to further examine the plant specimen. So the mystery will have to stop here for now.

Taxonomic hierarchies

How do we sort things? Let me count the ways....

Modern scientific taxonomy got started with Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). He was the man, I must say. After spending his younger years exploring the botanical biodiversity of Sweden and northern Europe, he dedicated his mature years to sitting in Uppsala and organizing the pieces of the world that came to him in the mail. Explorers went out to sea at his behest, and some of them - the ones that survived - sent him specimens of plants, animals, stones, whatever.

Linnaeus decided to organize everything. At the time the world must have seemed suddenly knowable, all things coming clear. Everything must belong to a type, and all types must fit into a hierarchical structure. (Could it be Latin grammar that gave him this idea?)

Linnaean organization especially emphasizes two things: kingdom and genus. Kingdom defines the nature of the beast. Genus names a category and allows specification to produce a binomial - a scientific name.

To start with the binomial: The scientific name of a species consists of two names, genus and species. The genus is its generic name, or category. The species is the name of a specific type of organism within that category.

Take the lion, Panthera leo. The generic category is panthers. What kind of panther? The "lion" kind. You could also have the "tiger" kind of panther, Panthera tigris, or the leopard kind of panther, Panthera pardus, which actually means "Panther panther." (The word "leopard" comes from two Greek words meaning "lion panther," so our common name for leopard means the same thing as the scientific name for lion. Haha!)

All those generic panthers belong to the cat family Felidae. So do generic little cats, in the genus Felis, "cat" in Latin. Linnaeus named our domestic cat Felis catus. Catus is another Latin word for cat. So a domestic cat is the "cat" kind of cat. Another little cat is called Felis silvestris, the kind of little cat that lives in the forest. Simple!

Now kingdoms. Linnaeus created three kingdoms - Plants, Animals, and Minerals - to encompass everything in the world. Anything missing? Minerals fell by the wayside pretty quickly, but they weren't the real problem.

The invention of the microscope suggested that microorganisms didn't fit into either Plants or Animals. In the 1860s biologists added a new kingdom, Monera, for all single-celled organisms. But all single-celled organisms aren't alike. Some are small and primitive with no nucleus, and others are large and well-organized with nuclei and membrane-bound organelles. Scientists started calling them prokaryotes and eukaryotes. In 1938 they added another kingdom, Protista, to hold single-celled eukaryotes. The prokaryotes - bacteria and cyanobacteria - stayed in Monera.

Now, fungi are really not at all similar to plants - no chlorophyll, chitin cell walls - so in the 1960s they got taken out of Plantae and put in their own kingdom Fungi. And animals, plants, and fungi are all eukaryotes, so it was kind of important to put them with single-celled eukaryotes if cell structure was going to be a category. But they were ALREADY kingdoms. We needed another level of taxonomy. So that led to the short-lived empires - Prokaryota and Eukaryota. Kingdom Monera went into Prokaryota. Eukaryota got everyone else - Animalia, Plantae, Protista, and Fungi.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, biologists started focusing on common ancestry instead of physical similarity. Microbiologists announced that prokaryotes were not all bacteria, and that some were in fact very very different - so different they deserved their own kingdom. In the 1990s they got rid of Monera and replaced it with Bacteria and Archaea. The empires were changed into domains called Prokarya and Eukarya.

And that didn't even last very long. Now there are three domains. Eukarya still contains animals, plants, fungi, and protists. But the kingdoms Bacteria and Archaea are now in domains called Bacteria and Archaea. This leaves room for more discoveries.

Do we still need kingdoms? Does the genus-species naming structure still work? Clearly many things don't fit into the Linnaean schema. Plant taxonomy is full of subspecies and subfamilies and things just called clades or tribes. Hominin (human ancestor) taxonomy got stuck with a family called Homidae - all the great apes - and several named genera, but then has had to fit lots of categories in between them for extinct taxa. (Chimpanzees are currently grouped in a tribe called ... Panini. That's funny.)

And don't even get me started on the slime molds and water molds! Poor Phytophthora, dumped by Fungi. My kingdom for a kingdom! At least they still fit in Eukarya.

One obvious problem with imposing an organizing structure on the world is that one then forces the world to conform to the structure, rather than the other way around. (It's not an animal, and it's not a mineral, so it MUST be a plant....) On the other hand, we have to be able to talk about stuff. It will be amusing to watch this process unfold over the next decades. Will Linnaeus disappear entirely?

Catesby's bison, Darwin's Scotch Firs, and Roan Mountain

Every fall Patrick McMillan takes his Plant Taxonomy class on a field trip to Roan Mountain, TN, to study island biogeography and the ecology of high grassy balds. He talks about the importance of ecosystem engineers in keeping things stable - in this case, keeping the grassy balds grassy.

Grass won't just stay grassy on its own. Left to its own devices, it often will go back to forest, probably through an ugly transitional stage involving lots of brambly bushes. What keeps the bushes and trees from growing? Large animals. In the case of our grassy balds, it was the bison and Indians that used to roam the Appalachians. (Before that - maybe mammoths? But that's a very long time ago.)

There were bison up in the South Carolina mountains in Catesby's time. He writes about them:

Preface, viii.
"I then went to the upper uninhabited parts of the country, and continued at and about Fort Moore, a small fortress on the banks of the River Savanna, which runs from thence a course of 300 miles down to the sea, and is about the same distance from its source, in the mountains. I was much delighted to see nature differ in these upper parts, and to find here abundance of things not to be seen in the lower parts of the country; this encouraged me to take several journeys with the Indians higher up the rivers, toward the mountains, which afforded not only a succession of new vegetable appearances, but most delightful prospects imaginable, besides the diversion of hunting buffelo's, bears, panthers, and other wild beasts."

In his entry on the Pseudo Acacia, he also mentions the bufello:

Vol. 1, Appendix p. 20, Bison americanus and Pseudo Acacia hispida floridus roseis
"I never saw any of these trees but at one place near the Appalachian mountains, where Bufellos had left their dung; and some of the trees had their branches pulled down, from which I conjecture they had been browsing on the leaves.... I visited them again at the proper time to get some seeds, but the ravaging Indians had burn'd the woods many miles around, and totally destroyed them, to my great disappointment; so that all I was able to procure of this specious tree was some Specimens of is which remain in the Hortus siccus of Sir. H. Sloane, and that of Professor Dillenius at Oxford."

As it happens, there are no Pseudo acacia in the Sloane specimens today, but there are two (00087396X and 00087400J) in the Oxford collections. Patrick has identified them as Robinia hartwigii Koehne, Granite dome locust.

There are no bison roaming the grassy balds today (no Indians burning the locust trees either), though Patrick would love to see them restored. Instead, there are cattle grazing in some areas. The grazed parts are empty and grassy. Just beside those grazed bits are areas with the same basic ecological components but no cattle. Those parts are overgrown with brambles, bushes, trees - no grassy balds there.

Charles Darwin described this phenomenon in On the Origin of Species, in Chapter 4, "Struggle for Existence:"

"How important an element enclosure is, I plainly saw near Farnham, in Surrey. Here there are extensive heaths, with a few clumps of old Scotch firs on the hill-tops; within the last ten years large spaces have been enclosed, and self-sown firs are now springing up in multitudes, so close together that all cannot live. When I ascertained that these young trees had not been planted, I was so surprised at their numbers that I examined hundreds of acres of the unenclosed heath, and literally I could not see a single Scotch fir, except the old planted stumps. But on looking closely between the stems of the heath, I found a multitude of seedlings which had been perpetually browsed down by the cattle. In one square yard I counted thirty-two little trees; and one of them, with twenty-six rings of growth, had during many years, tried to raise its head above the stems of the heath, and had failed. No wonder that, as soon as the land was enclosed, it became thickly clothed with vigorously growing young firs."

"Here we see that cattle absolutely determine the existence of the Scotch fir...."

Rattle snakes and Alexipharmacal plants

Our intrepid Carolina explorers were always worried about rattlesnakes. What does one do about snakes that make frightening noises and whose bites can result in pain, bleeding, nausea and vomiting, low blood pressure, blurred vision, tissue damage, etc. (Although apparently not all rattlesnake bites even deliver venom; it's possible to get bitten and come to no serious harm.) The main effective treatment these days is antivenom, which wasn't around in the early 1700s. Catesby worried quite a bit about rattlesnakes - see his descriptions of their bites in the Natural History (vol. 2, p. 41), and in his plant collections.

Joseph Lord, living in coastal South Carolina in 1704, was also concerned. Three of his specimens contain labels mentioning the use of plants against rattlesnake bites. My favorite is this one, Eupatorium rotundifolium on H.S. 268 f. 35. His label reads:

“This (I think) I have sent you formerly without a name, as now it comes: but I desire you would please to let me know it’s name. Besides that an Indian told me of it's use in feavers, its found to be Alexipharmacal, & an admirable antidote against the Poison of Rattle-snakes in particular, conquering the Venom of their biteing. Gathered, Aug. 15, 1704, having been near a month in flower. It grows common in our woods, both in high & low land. There are divers other plants growing commonly that seem to be varieties of this.”

Alexipharmacal? I had to look that one up. It means an antidote, from the Greek words “ἀλέξειν, alexia,” meaning “to ward off,” and “φαρμακός, pharmakos” for “drug.”

Lord’s label makes it appear that the Indians and the Colonials who arrived here after them were all looking for the same thing as modern doctors - an antivenom. So would this plant work? Well, the closely related Eupatorium perfoliatum goes by the common name “boneset” or sometimes “ague-weed.” It was historically used to treat fevers and other assorted ailments. So maybe this one would work too.

One of the other rattlesnake plants is a specimen of Ageratina aromatica on H.S. 268 f. 33. Common name? “Small-leaved white snakeroot” or “Lesser snakeroot.”

Ageratina used to belong to the genus Eupatorium - of massive snakebite treatment fame. And Lord describes this one as “of the Tribe … of whose vertue against the biting of the rattle-snake I have made mention.” Sounds like taxonomy to me - long before Linnaeus.

Joseph Lord, a new 18th-century buddy

When I was in London a couple of weeks ago, I spent a day at the Natural History Museum, photographing a few more collections from the Sloane Herbarium. I had found three collectors we'd missed with our first round of photography. They are Joseph Lord, Col. Halsteed, and George Franklin - three guys who were in South Carolina between 1700 and 1710. That makes them the earliest collections we've worked with so far.

Joseph Lord is by far the most important of these three. Lord was a true American, born in Massachusetts in 1672 and educated at Harvard, after which he became a minister. (Did anyone from Massachusetts become anything else?) In 1695, Lord took a group of parishioners to South Carolina and founded the town of Dorchester. He built a house there and developed a plantation, which he mentions repeatedly in the notes to his plant collection.

Ah, yes, the plant collection! And the notes! Lord made his plant collection in 1704, and sent it to London to James Petiver, an apothecary who assembled a number of the collections in the Sloane. Lord's handwriting is beautifully legible, and he recorded useful details - things like color of flowers (a detail that is lacking in many herbarium specimens, which tend to be shades of brown), growing conditions, type of soil, and collection date. Patrick has already made good use of Lord's notes in the determinations we've begun.

We've already found something super cool - a specimen of Schwalbea americana, American Chaffseed, in the lower right corner of H.S. 158 f. 245.This is almost certainly the first collection of this plant, which is now in danger of dying out completely. This plant was listed as a federally endangered species in 1995.

American chaffseed is native to the longleaf pine ecosystem. It's a hemiparasite, or partial parasite - it performs some photosynthesis on its own but gets some of its nutrients and water by attaching itself to host plants with specialized roots called haustoria. It's not particular about hosts - American chaffseed parasitizes longleaf pines, hollies, and various grasses and composites. It's a fire-adapted species that depends on periodic fires to clear out vegetation to allow seeds to germinate and seedlings to establish themselves. Fires were regular occurrences in the longleaf pine savanna that was common in South Carolina before European settlement, but that has nearly disappeared from the region today.

This is one of the rarest plants on earth today. The 2008 5-year review noted 33 occurrences in South Carolina, 12 of which were considered protected but none with formal protection agreements and only one with a formal management plan. Almost all occurrences were in the Francis Marion National Forest. Total numbers had dropped between 1995 and 2008; and remember, those 2008 numbers are based on surveys done prior to 2008. So we don't really know how many of these plants are left. Some of these areas are being managed with controlled burns, which benefits a whole range of fire-adapted species. But there's not much space for them, and small populations are prone to getting smaller.

So it's neat that Lord picked an American chaffseed.

An introduced invasive - in 1710

Patrick and I have gone through some of John Lawson's specimens - so far we've done determinations on his specimens in H.S. 158 and H.S. 145. These are intriguing because they were collected in 1710 or earlier (couldn't have been later, because Lawson was killed by Indians in 1711 - more on that in a bit). That was long before major European settlement in the Carolinas, more than a decade earlier than Mark Catesby. Lawson wrote a really great book about his adventures, A New Voyage to Carolina, which describes his fun with native Americans after most of them had died from smallpox but before they disappeared as a significant social force in the area. (Many thanks to UNC for digitizing this book!)

Anyway, Lawson was kicking around the Carolinas EARLY. The Lords Proprietors didn't get going with the Province of Carolina until 1663. Charleston, SC was founded in 1670. (This would be a great time to review my Restoration history - you known, when Charles II took the monarchy back in the wake of Oliver Cromwell's death.) Lawson set out for the Carolinas as an explorer, mainly because he heard that Carolina was the best place to go, and spent the next decade traveling around the countryside. His writing displays enthusiasm for his surroundings, keen observation of both natural history and human interactions, and a good sense of humor at said interactions. Also, his descriptions of animals combine observations on their physique and behavior with culinary notes. His book was a bestseller in Europe and persuaded many would-be settlers to follow Lawson into the wilds of Carolina.

Because Carolina was still wild when Lawson was there. There were some settlements, and some farms, but much of his food on his journey came from native Americans who were hunting and gathering wild foods. Not many Europeans had yet arrived in this area.

So imagine my surprise to find a specimen of Rumex crispus, curly dock, in his collection! (It's on H.S. 145 f. 62.) He (or someone) even wrote a note on it - "Wild dock a sorrell, Trout River June 20th 1710, vid with Leed[?]"(Lawson's handwriting is a bit difficult for me to decipher. "Vid" means "saw", and I think he is saying that he saw this plant with a man named Leed, or perhaps Lord.) The remark about "sorrell" is correct, as all the members of the genus Rumex are commonly called docks or sorrels.

This plant is native to Eurasia. It's currently present in every state in the U.S., and most of the world too. North Carolina now considers it one of the most troublesome invasive weeds in the state. The seeds get into agricultural seeds and they stick to clothing. So how did the darn thing get to the Trout River by 1710? Did some Englishman go walking in the countryside and then board a ship without washing his trousers? Did someone carefully save some seeds to plant in the New World, as a healthful taste of home?

In any case, that sure was fast. People move, and plants go with.

Catesby collected a bunch of introduced plants 13 years after Lawson. In a couple of weeks I'm going to the Sloane to photograph more plants collected between 1700 and 1710. We shall see how much of old Europe had managed to establish itself in North America by that point.

Oh, Lawson's death? Well, in his own book, Lawson describes a method of torture used by Indians in which they would stick a victim full of pine splinters and then set him on fire, to dance to their delight. Lawson was captured by the Tuscorora Indians in 1711 and apparently put to death, though no one knows exactly how this occurred. Lawson's friend Christopher Gale claimed that he died according to the pattern he had himself described. Qui sait?

Animals in the Herbarium

If you've ever been snorkling or scuba diving in the Caribbean, you will have noticed waving fields of things that look for all the world like plants. They grow out of the sandy or coral bottom, they are branched, and they sway gracefully in the current.

Plants they are not, though. You are looking at animals called gorgonians, also known as sea fans or sea whips. They're related to coral. (Sorry for citing to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a good reference!)

What makes them animals and not plants? Among other things, they can't make their own food. They have to catch plankton and eat that. (Actually, lots of gorgonians do have symbiotic relationships with photosynthetic algae that produce some food for them, but in no sense are gorgonians plants.)

When Mark Catesby visited the Bahamas, he had no way of knowing that the sea fans he saw were not plants. They sure look plant-like! So he collected a gorgonian, and sent it off to London with his other herbarium specimens. That is why there are animals in his herbarium at Oxford.