Talk:Cave s.n., Tista (1913)
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Evidentiary scope
The typed label carries a river name, an altitude, a collector and a day: Tista at 1,000 feet, collected by G. H. Cave on 1 July 1913. It has no habitat note, no use, no local name and no statement about cultivation, so nothing shows whether the plant was cultivated, grew wild or had escaped. The accession is classified Unknown. It documents Cannabis low in the Tista valley on 1 July 1913. No conservation priority is assigned.
Georeferencing
Tista names the river, not a settlement. The label gives no district and no bank. The altitude of 1,000 feet, about 305 m, puts the gathering on the middle river: the Teesta passes that contour between the Sikkim boundary near Rangpo and the Darjeeling hills below.
The province is given as West Bengal on the day's other collecting. Cave's sheets of 1 July 1913 include a Solanum torvum georeferenced by RBGE to Rishap in the Darjeeling hills (GBIF occurrence 686673339), which places him on the West Bengal side that day. No district is asserted, because the two banks of the Teesta there lie in different districts and the label does not say which one the plant came from.
RBGE's own georeferencing of Cave's Tista sheets is not consistent: some carry Sikkim; two carry the note that the name could be anywhere along the river. That inconsistency is the reason for asserting no district. The coordinate is Teesta Bazaar in OpenStreetMap (node 4487551935), 27.07, 88.42: the named settlement on the reach where the river runs at the label's altitude, standing at about 276 m against the label's 1,000 feet, which is 305 m. It locates the sheet to that reach and no further. The qualifying stretch runs about 25 km up to the Sikkim boundary near Rangpo, so this is a loose coordinate, and it is a georeference for the reach rather than a reconstructed collection point.
The coordinate georeferences the place the label names, at two decimal places, with the mapped object named above. The point stands at the lower end of a qualifying reach about 25 km long, so the uncertainty takes in the whole reach, with 1 km added for the rounding of the point. An earlier version of this note put it at about 15 km. Basis: settlement point. Uncertainty: about 26 km. Éloise 06:11, 18 September 2026 (+07)
Editorial treatment
The title uses the label's Tista. The modern form is Teesta, which the article gives and links.
The label is a printed Edinburgh herbarium form and not a field slip, so the wording is the garden's, not the collector's. The date is written 1.7.1913 in the day-month-year order the series uses throughout.
George Herbert Cave was curator of the Lloyd Botanic Garden at Darjeeling from 1904 to 1928 (RBGE Botanics Stories). That note gives his dates as 1872 to 1965 while IPNI gives 1870 to 1965; the article states neither, since nothing here turns on them.
Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 04:44, 18 September 2026 (+07)
Other sheets
Harvard's index gives barcode 00449853 (Arnold Arboretum herbarium) the collector G. H. Cave, the locality Tista, 1000 ft and 1 July 1913: the place, altitude and day of the Edinburgh label. The article names it as another sheet of the gathering on those values. Harvard publishes no image of it, and the infobox keeps this sheet's values. Éloise 00:50, 29 October 2026 (+07)