Talk:Dukerley s.n., Bône (s.d.)
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Discussion
Evidentiary scope
The label states cultivation, a country and a collector and leaves the year unfinished. The accession establishes that a plant of Cannabis sativa was grown somewhere in Algeria, at a place written Bon and broken off and gathered by a Dr Dukerley at an unstated date in the nineteenth century. It is classified Other. No conservation priority is assigned.
This is the only sheet in the Algerian batch whose image could be fetched, so it is the only one whose label has actually been read. Everything in the article attributed to the sheet comes from the Meise IIIF service at master resolution.
The catalogue is empty and the label is not
Meise records this specimen with locality S.L., date S.D. and no habitat. Read from the catalogue alone it is a country-level occurrence with nothing in it. The label carries a cultivation statement, a place begun, a country, a collector and a century. This is the same lesson the Congolese batch produced: the sheet is worth reading even where the catalogue looks complete and here the catalogue does not even look complete.
Georeferencing
The label's place is written Bon followed by a long horizontal stroke and stops. Read as it stands it is not a place at all.
The reading adopted is Bône, now Annaba, for one reason that is documented and not inferred from the shape of the letters: Isidore Dukerley's own published note to the Société botanique de France opens with an expert examination of kif and ordinary hemp that he carried out at Bône at the end of July 1865 and he wrote it up from Batna in August 1866. A cannabis sheet collected in Algeria by Dukerley and labelled cult. Bon is very likely from that work.
That is a reading and not a transcription. The alternative title, Dukerley s.n. (s.d.) with no locality, is recorded as ruling R3. No coordinate or elevation is asserted either way: the label names no site, no altitude and no habitat. The province and locality fields carry Annaba on the strength of the reading alone.
The date
The label's year line reads 18 followed by a gap and a full stop. The century was written and the year never filled in, which caps the gathering at 1899 but fixes nothing closer.
The title therefore takes (s.d.) and not (by 1899). The naming reference allows by where a firm latest limit exists and gives the collector's death year as the usual source of one. Isidore Dukerley's dates were not found in this pass; the International Plant Names Index does not hold him, because he published no plant names. A blank century stub is a weaker warrant than a death year and (s.d.) says plainly that the sheet is undated. This is ruling R4.
Custody dates on the sheet are not used for the title. The Bullemont collection reached Meise from Leuven in 1999 and the Harvard sampling label is dated 2018; both describe the sheet's later history.
The collector
Three sources give three forms. The label reads coll. Dr Dukerley, with no initial. Meise indexes him as Dukerley E. The Société botanique de France indexes the 1866 note under Dukerley (Is.) and prints the forename in the article heading.
The collector field takes Dukerley with no initial, which is what the sheet says and what neither of the other two contradicts. Meise's E. and the Société's Is. cannot both be right and choosing between them would put an unsourced initial into a stored value and into the title. The article names Isidore Dukerley only where it discusses the 1866 note, which is where the forename is sourced. This is ruling R6.
Editorial treatment
The specimen description in the article comes from the sheet image at master resolution: three mounted pieces, a pistillate head with achenes held in the bracts, a bare stem and a stem with its root. The sex is called from the bracts and achenes, not from the catalogue, which records neither.
The section on the kif variety is included because two sources connect this collector to a name that another accession in the same batch is filed under. It is kept to what those two sources say: Dukerley's note describes the Algerian plant and declines to make it a separate species and de Candolle's Prodromus defines var. kif as the plant cultivated in Algeria under the names kif and tekrouri, referring the reader to Dukerley. The claim that this sheet is one of the specimens Dukerley sent to the Société is not made, because it is not sourced: the Société's minutes record that he sent specimens with the note and no number or repository ties them to this one.
These notes were recorded during accession preparation. Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 08:11, 18 September 2026 (+07)