Published Collections

The Farlow Herbarium houses substantial collections of published diatom exsiccatae. These collections were issued as replicates, and specimens in them were serially numbered with the consequences that "a specimen in [a published] exsiccata can be cited as precisely as a passage in a book, and 'copies' will be found in several or many herbaria" (Sayre, G. Cryptogamae Exsiccatae -- An Annotated Bibliography of Published Exsiccatae of Algae, Lichens, Hepaticae, and Musci. Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden 19, 1969). This catalog documents c. 13,000 records of the association of diatom taxa, geographical localities and collectors from 34 of these published exsiccatae. A bibliography of the published exsiccatae subsumed by this catalog is included .

This catalog is based primarily on a detailed, exhaustive examination of specimen labels and published indexes from these exsiccatae. This catalog does not present a necessarily literal record of taxa and geographical localities found on specimen labels. In that I originally marshalled this information into alphabetical indexes* for publication in the form of a book, I supplemented geographical information, corrected errors, standardized orthographic variants and multilingual place names, and made other changes that would enhance cohesion of the same taxa names and localities in a book format. Those modifications are not listed in this catalog; the original publication should be consulted for them at present, although I am annotating the catalog entries as I transfer them into this new format.

* Edgar, Robert K. 1987. Diatoms in published exsiccatae at the Farlow Herbarium: indexes to taxa, geographical localities and diatomists. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Farlow Herbarium & Library, Harvard University, 500 pp.

Each record in this catalog consist of several lines ordered as follows:

• taxa [e.g., Achnanthes parvula Kützing]; one taxon per line
• collectors, determiners or other persons associated with the sample, [e.g., Louis Alphonse de Brébisson]
• locality [e.g., Wales (Dyfed) Neyland]
• published exsiccatae author(s) & number [e.g., Eulenstein 54]

• Authors of specific epithets are recorded only if they were also recorded on the specimen labels or in original indexes. No author's surnames are abbreviated. Diacritical marks are included in the spelling of names where appropriate.
• Localities are presented in a nested hierarchy: country (province) locality. Diacritical marks are included in spelling locality names where appropriate. Entries made in the original index under Soviet Union and Yugoslavia persist in this catalog with those names. Entries made in the original index to FRG [Federal Republic of Germany] and GDR [German Democratic Republic] are presented in this catalog as Germany.
• References to published exsiccatae are to the author's name (or two or more authors in the case of multi-authored sets) and to the serial number within that set with which the specimen is associated, e.g., Van Heurck 245. . Each set of author names provided has a unique correspondence to the exsiccatae listed in the accompanying bibliography .