Hunt Institute Archives Text Discovery Platform

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While the processing of a taxonomic problem is essentially complete with the development of a key, we are seldom long satisfied with the work accomplished because modifications and additions to our knowledge of plants continue to accrue from many different areas. For these reasons, the chart indicates a "feed-back" at all levels. If one uses the classification of plants or animals in studies of evolution, one frequently finds information that will affect the classification, and may cause a shift in our concepts of the taxa in the classification. Similarly, ecological studies of the environmental factors affecting the taxa will give additional insights that may or may not change our classification. The constant improvement of classifications is an important work, not liable to reach a static stage. If we are to reflect the most modern thinking about organisms, and the recent investigations of the basic hereditary materials DNA and RNA are providing much insight into the relationships of organisms, we must find new methods to cope with the ever-increasing knowledge. Only by the application of mathematical models, coupled with a large-memory capacity computer, can we hope to successfully fulfill the mission of the taxonomist. It is to these problems that we address ourselves in The New York Botanical Garden.

Dr. Maguire: I have not been attached to this program although it is of interest to me. Dr. Steere has pointed out that the herbarium of The New York Botanical Garden is a large one. It holds about three million specimens. That is a lot of plant material. There are perhaps two other institutions in the U.S. with herbaria to compare with this one in New York. One is in Washington--the National Herbarium--and the other is at Harvard University--the combined Gray Herbarium and Arnold Arboretum Herbarium. Each of these three major institutions has about three million specimens. There are other institutions, many others. Missouri Botanical Garden has about one and a half million, and the Chicago Museum has about two million specimens. Philadelphia has about one million, and many universities, with the exception of Harvard which stands well above all the others, have large and very important herbaria. Altogether then in the major herbaria of the country, there are about 14 million specimens on record that would be of interest to work of this sort. In Europe this process has gone on much longer; there are more herbaria and larger. Perhaps the largest is at Kew with some six million specimens. Paris has five million, Leningrad five million and many have one, two, or three million specimens. The total reservoir runs into the tens of millions of specimens.

The herbarium is a collection of dried, pressed specimens. It is a collection of all kinds of plants. These specimens are arranged in a very efficient system. There are several systems that have developed during the last two or three hundred years which have resulted in the two or three primary systems that apply in the world today. These systems have evolved out of the use, the study and the understanding of relationship of the plants themselves. The system now is so developed that anyone who has a little information or knowledge can put his hand on any specimen that he chooses within just a few minutes.