Talk:Chevalier 42218 (1931)
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Evidentiary scope
The catalogue gives a town, a number and a date and nothing else. The accession establishes the presence of Cannabis sativa at Adrar in the Touat, credited to Auguste Chevalier and numbered 42218. It says nothing about cultivation, wild growth, habitat, use or a local name and it carries no altitude. It is classified Other. No conservation priority is assigned.
Adrar is the deepest Saharan locality in the Algerian series, which makes the silence of this accession more frustrating than most. Chevalier published extensively on his collecting; anything he wrote about the Touat in 1931 and 1932 would be the natural place to find the habitat and use notes this sheet lacks. That is on the batch follow-ups list.
The label has not been read
An image of this sheet is published with the GBIF occurrence, but `mediaphoto.mnhn.fr` and `science.mnhn.fr` both sit behind a bot check that refuses automated requests. The article rests on the catalogue's own transcription, republished through GBIF and not on a reading of the sheet. This sheet's only published image is issued under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. That licence allows the wiki to host the image unaltered with credit for a non-commercial purpose. Resizing for display counts as a permitted technical modification; what the licence forbids is sharing a cropped or edited version. The licence template it needs, Template:CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0, was created for it on 18 September 2026.
The date
31 December is the shape a year-only date usually takes when a database demands a day, so the catalogued 1931-12-31 was tested before being stored.
It survives the test. This publisher encodes a year-only date as a span running 1 January to 31 December, which is exactly what Steinheil s.n., Bône (1834) and Barat s.n., Sig (1850) carry and it encodes a seasonal range as a real span, which is what Durando s.n., Sig (1850) carries. A single closed day is used for dates the publisher asserts as days, as on the 1858, 1930, 1942 and 1960 sheets. 31 December 1931 is stored on that basis. It should still be checked against the sheet when the image can be read and the year alone is the fallback if the label disagrees.
The date passes the lifespan test: Auguste Chevalier lived from 1873 to 1956.
The collection number
This is the one sheet of the Algerian series whose catalogue entry carries a gathering number; the other nine are s.n.
The catalogue puts 42218 in the field for a field number and not in the field for a collector number. Chevalier numbered his gatherings in one running series and a number in the forty thousands is consistent with his fieldwork of the early 1930s, so the title takes the standard collector number form and not the s.n. plus locality form the other Algerian sheets use. The alternative title, Chevalier s.n., Adrar (1931), is recorded as ruling R8.
Georeferencing
Adrar is the seat of Adrar Province. The catalogue gives no site within the oasis, no altitude and no habitat, so no coordinate or elevation is asserted.
These notes were recorded during accession preparation. Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 08:12, 18 September 2026 (+07)