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Appendix

Concerning Plant Collecting by Members of the Armed Forces

This note is prepared to accompany letters written in answer to inquiries concerning plant collecting for the U.S. National Herbarium.

Why collect: Many people think that the plants of the region in which they are stationed are already thoroughly known and it would be useless to gather more material. This idea is erroneous because: (1) Collecting these plants may be a valuable occupation for increasing your knowledge of the plant life about you through having the specimens identified for you. (2) No part of the world is entirely known botanically and few at all adequately. (3) This herbarium may not have specimens of all the species of your area, even if they are common, or may not have specimens showing adequately both flowers and fruits and their variations, or our specimens may lack valuable data which you may supply on the labels with your specimens. (4) Delicate material is needed to exchange with other institutions and to help rebuild the bombed-out herbaria of Europe and elsewhere. Also people often think the flora around them consists entirely of commonplace littoral weeds or plants of cultivation. Suppose sometime it becomes important to know when a certain weed was introduced to a certain isolated Pacific island by airplanes. If we do not know what was on the island before the advent of airplanes, we can scarcely say when some new pest arrived. If a person still thinks neither he nor science will benefit by his collecting, he should remember that there are groups very little collected, such as mosses, liverworts, fungi, algae (including seaweeds and diatoms), and lichens.

What to collect: Collect specimens of what interests you and for which you want names. Generally avoid sterile material, i.e., without flowers or fruits, because of the difficulty of accurate identification without these parts. Remember the grasses—they are too often overlooked as being "just grass and no one wants that". If at the seashore, collect marine algae washed up on the beach, if you can not pull them off the rocks at low tide or dive for them. Remember the diatoms which are attached to the seaweeds. (see under How to collect.) The various forms of fungi, both saprophytic, like mushrooms, and parasitic, like wheat rust, are needed, but in case you collect the latter prepare also normal specimens of the hosts. Cultivated crop plants are rare in herbaria, but are often of much value and are desired in certain collections, especially specimens of special varieties not widely distributed. Notes on all these are essential and may often make an otherwise useless specimen very valuable. Too often herbaria have only specimens representing abnormal leaf sizes, especially of forms with leaves that are too large for a normal sheet. Hence, collect material representing variations in leaf size, shape, color, etc., and of other variations in parts. Do not hesitate to have one collection represented by two or more sheets.