Talk:Richard Evans Schultes
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R.E. Schultes, alone or beside T.C. Plowman and T.E. Lockwood; that title redirects here, and the specimen table queries both forms.Discussion
Birthplace
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences memorial minute (Harvard Gazette, 18 September 2003) says he was born in Boston on 12 January 1915 and grew up and was schooled in East Boston. Plotkin (Harvard Magazine, 2022) and Bussmann (Plant Science Bulletin 57(2), 2011) say he was born in East Boston. The article follows the minute.
Museum posts, 1958–1985
The Gazette obituary (2001) makes him curator of economic botany from 1958 to 1985. The memorial minute (2003) makes him Curator of Ethnobotany from 1958 to 1967, before he became executive director and then director. The 1975 contributor note in Cannabis and Culture calls him Curator of Economic Botany. The article follows the obituary. The minute also names his 1973 chair the Mangelsdorf Professorship of Natural History; the obituary, the 1974 paper and the 1975 note say Natural Sciences.
Editorships and the 1992 medal
The Society for Ethnobotany's list of past editors gives his term on Economic Botany as January 1962 to December 1979; Bussmann says 15 years. His editorship of the Botanical Museum Leaflets is dated only by the 1975 contributor note. The 1992 award rests on the Gazette obituary, which calls it the Society's gold medal. The Linnean Society says the Linnean Medal was struck in gold only until 1976, and its online lists of medallists start in 2019, so the article attributes the award to the Gazette.
Kandahar habitat of Schultes 26505
The 1974 paper's plate shows the source plant of Schultes 26505 in fields near Kandahar. Anderson (1974), who sectioned its wood, calls the material a wild population at Pashimool, west of Kandahar. McPartland and Small (2020) describe the plant as an escape in a formerly irrigated field. The article gives the plate's wording and the locality near Kandahar. Pashimool has not been matched to a gazetteer name.
Collector number of the Tropicos record
The Tropicos record published through GBIF (occurrence 3115496397; Missouri Botanical Garden 101275986, ECON) is the epitype of var. afghanica, collected by Schultes near Kandahar on 13 December 1971, with the collector number s.n.. McPartland and Small cite the epitype as ECON 26505, collected 13–20 December 1971. The record and the number are taken to be the same sheet on that citation; the Tropicos page itself asks for a login.
Other Kandahar numbers
Small and Cronquist (1976) cite Schultes 26503, 26504 and 26508 from Kandahar, with duplicates at DAO and ECON. None has an accession page. Harvard's online specimen index returns no Cannabis records at all (searched 11 October 2026), so these sheets were located only through the 1976 citation. Datura sheets of the same trip (26501, Lamatak near Jalalabad, 12 December 1971; 26502, Kandahar, 13 December 1971) are in the index.
Mississippi sheets elsewhere
Duplicates of the 1972 garden sheets are at the Smithsonian (US 2738070–2738082 and 2773550), Paris (P06884281) and Leiden (U.1198655), as published through GBIF. Anderson (1980) counts 237 specimens from 32 seed sources. Some GBIF records give a country that is the seed's origin or a data error (US 2773550 Ghana; P06884281 Nepal).
Name of the wood anatomist
The djvu text layer of the 1974 paper reads Doran C. Anderson; the BHL text layer of the same scan, and Anderson's own paper, give Loran C. Anderson. The 1974 paper places him at Kansas State University; his own paper, later that year, at Florida State University.
Dates of the court opinions
United States v. Honneus is dated 24 December 1974 in the Caselaw Access Project and 28 April 1975 in CourtListener. The article uses the Caselaw date. Winters v. State says Schultes had testified about 15 years earlier that there seemed to be only one species; the opinion does not name that earlier case.
Court cases not used
The opinions in Cassady v. Wheeler (Iowa 1974), People v. Krall (Illinois 1975), Haynes v. State (Alabama 1975), United States v. Gavic (1975), Nix v. State (Tennessee 1975), State v. Collins (North Dakota 1977), State v. Vail (Minnesota 1979), People v. Van Alstyne and People v. Rege (1975) and Purifoy v. State (Florida 1978) cite Schultes's writings or testimony given elsewhere; he was not a witness in them. Cassady and Krall also name cases in which he is said to have testified (United States v. Moore, a case reported as Lewallen, United States v. Holleman, Honeyman, Reed in San Francisco) and Haynes quotes a report of an acquittal in Florida in 1973; those opinions or records have not been read.
Label name
His standard label name is R. E. Schultes (Harvard Index of Botanists). The accession pages store R.E. Schultes without the space, and that form redirects here. No page uses R. E. Schultes.
Unconsulted works
Prance's tribute (2001) is known here from its Crossref record only. Random thoughts and queries on the botany of Cannabis (1970), Man and marijuana (1973), Emboden's Cannabis: a polytypic genus (1974) and Wade Davis's One River (1996) have not been read. Schultes's Afghan field notes of 1971, if any survive, have not been looked for in the Harvard archives.
Portrait
No freely licensed portrait has been found. The lead image is the specimen photograph from McPartland and Small (2020), CC BY 4.0, as on Schultes 26505 (1971).