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Botanical libraries and herbaria in North America. 4. The Samuel Botsford Buckley – Rebecca Mann Dean mystery
Author(s) -
Dorr Laurence J.
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
taxon
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.819
H-Index - 81
eISSN - 1996-8175
pISSN - 0040-0262
DOI - 10.2307/1224474
Subject(s) - herbarium , botanical garden , taxon , library science , wife , archaeology , history , geography , classics , law , botany , biology , political science , computer science
Summary Dorr, L. J.: Botanical libraries and herbaria in North America. 4. The Samuel Botsford Buckley – Rebecca Mann Dean mystery. – Taxon 46: 661‐687. 1997. – ISSN 0040‐0262. Samuel Botsford Buckley (1809‐1884) amassed a herbarium of approximately 6000 specimens through his own labours and through exchange with other botanists, mostly American but also European. This herbarium was acquired by Rebecca Mann Dean (1821‐1890), a professor of natural history and other subjects at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, and wife of a bookstore owner who had a brief row with Buckley in the 1850s. Before her death, she sold Buckley's herbarium to Washington University, St Louis, Missouri. Within a few years of the sale, the herbarium was combined with that of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Neither the botanical activities of Buckley, which are fairly well understood, nor the nature of the transaction conveying the herbarium from Buckley to Dean, which is still problematic, could have been sketched without information contained in correspondence saved by botanical libraries and other scholarly institutions. The importance of keeping botanical libraries and archives in close proximity to herbaria is reaffirmed by this case study.