St.Hilaire expeditions - did he collect the plants??
Fernando Rivadavia Lopes (ferndriv@usp.br)
Sun, 4 Feb 1996 18:27:05 -0300 (GRNLNDST)
To all,
On my recent trip to Europe I saw TYPE material for many
Brazilian CPs, most of which were collected by the French botanist
Auguste de Saint Hilaire in the early 1800's. The collections are very
numerous and from distant parts of the country.
Now I'm wondering if he really did travel to all those places or
if he just sat around in Rio de Janeiro (or maybe even back in Paris)
waiting for the plants to be brought back to him by expeditions which he
only helped organize. I know the difficulties I've had in these past few
years going after CPs in the wild here in Brazil and I can hardly begin to
imagine how difficult it was back then! Not only were there often no roads
nor trails, but there were hostile natives and loads of unknown diseases.
In fact, the stories we often hear of these old expeditions is that most
people never even made it back! So did Saint Hilaire really go to the TYPE
locations of the CPs and other plants he described??
I forgot to look if there were collection dates on the TYPE
material I saw, but I know from Jan Schlauer's CP nomenclatural synopsis
(which is always sitting on the table next to the keyboard!) that there
are no collection numbers and the only date listed is the date of
publication for the species. This might pose a problem for some of the
plants I'm studying, whose TYPE locations are not very specific.
For example, the TYPE location for D.villosa is "Serra Negra
(Black Mountains), Minas Gerais". The problem is that I know of 2 Serra
Negras in the state of Minas Gerais (one in the SE part of the state and
the other near Diamantina, in the central part of the state) and I know
St.Hilaire's expeditions passed at least close to both. So which of the 2
is the true TYPE location for this species?
There is also a problem with the TYPE D.tomentosa (=D.montana
var.tomentosa), which is supposedly from "Itambe, Minas Gerais". I
thought this could be the Itambe Peak, just south of Diamantina, yet the
D.montana I found growing there had much less hairy peduncles than the
ones in the TYPE D.tomentosa material. Are there other places called
Itambe, or is the TYPE location wrong? I don't doubt that collections
could've gotten accidentally mixed up somewhere along the way. Not to
mention that that particular collection seemed, to me, to be a mixed
collection. Who knows who did the actual collections and how scrupulous
or careful they were?
For G.aurea, the TYPE location is listed as "Serra de Caraca (the
last "c" having that little 'leg' below and sounding like "ss") & Serra de
Ibitipoca, Minas Gerais". I don't doubt that this species could occur at
these 2 distant mountain ranges, but I've been to both and have never seen
any trace of this species. I doubt they've gone extinct in these 2
well-preserved areas, so were the location names messed up?
By the way, Jan, I thought it was no longer allowed by modern
taxonomy for a species to have more than one TYPE locality? So what's
the deal with this species?
Anyways, I was hoping that maybe by studying the books describing
his expeditions, I could not only find out if he actually did go on any
or all of the expeditions in which his species were collected, but also
resolve some of the dubious TYPE locations. The problem is the lack of a
collection date for the TYPE specimens. Does anyone know if there are
collection dates for the TYPE material of Saint Hilaire's plants? Has
anyone ever read anything about St.Hilaire's expeditions which might help?
Fernando Rivadavia
Sao Paulo, Brazil