Talk:Thomson s.n. (by 1878)
More actions
Discussion for: Thomson s.n. (by 1878) • View • Links • Related changes
Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.
Discussion
Evidentiary scope
The mounted label is a printed distribution label whose filled lines read Hab. Himal. Bor. Occ. (north-west Himalaya), Regio. temp. (temperate zone) and Coll. T.T. It gives no date, no number, no altitude and no named place; a pencil word below it begins Kashm and runs under the label. In his published narrative of the journey, Thomson wrote that hemp in the Kashmir Valley grows spontaneously along the banks of the river, forming dense thickets often twelve and fifteen feet in height, and almost impenetrable. That is his general statement about the valley, not a note on this sheet, whose label gives no habitat. Nothing on the sheet shows whether the plant was cultivated, grew wild or had escaped. The accession is classified Unknown, and no conservation priority is assigned. It documents Cannabis collected by Thomas Thomson in the temperate north-west Himalaya, in material distributed under the Hooker and Thomson Indian herbarium.
Georeferencing
Hab. Himal. Bor. Occ. is Himalaya borealis occidentalis, the north-west Himalaya. Regio. temp. is the temperate zone. That is a belt some hundreds of kilometres long, so no province, district, locality or coordinate is asserted and the country alone is carried.
A pencil word on the mount, below a pencilled Cannabis sativa, begins Kashm and disappears under the edge of the mounted label. It is likely to read Kashmir, but the word cannot be read whole and is not used as a locality.
Editorial treatment
The label carries no gathering date, so the title takes the form (by <year>) with the collector's death year as the limit, which is the default form. Thomas Thomson lived from 1817 to 1878 (IPNI 10621-1).
A tighter limit is visible on the sheet and is deliberately not used. The circular stamp Herbarium Hookerianum 1867 marks the sheet as part of William Hooker's herbarium, which would put the gathering before 1867. Thomson's north-west Himalayan travels are usually dated to the late 1840s. Neither point is sourced here. The convention says never to title by a custody date, so the title stays at the death year. A retitle to a tighter bound would be an ordinary move once a source is in hand.
The collection date field is left empty instead of carrying a guess, as it is on Griffith 4686 (by 1845).
The printed slip From the Herbarium, Royal Gardens, Kew. Presented. records the route to Edinburgh, not the gathering.
Thomson's other Edinburgh sheet is Thomson 229 (by 1878). A third, E00248603, carries Thomson material mounted with a Canadian sheet of Lawson's and is held back until the two are separated.
Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 04:43, 18 September 2026 (+07)
A second Edinburgh sheet with this slip
Edinburgh sheet E00248603 carries the same printed Herb. Ind. Or. Hook. fil. & Thomson slip, filled in Cannabis sativa var. indica, Hab. Himal. Bor. Occ., Regio temp., Alt. 1–7000 ped. and Coll. T.T. It differs from this sheet's slip in the variety and the altitude, which this sheet's slip leaves blank. The same sheet carries a second gathering, Lawson's Canadian Plants no. 84 from the Falls of Niagara, September 1858, which has its own accession, Lawson 84 (1858). Nothing on the mount marks which plant goes with which label. The slip names a region and an altitude band, not a gathering, so the sheet is not treated as a further sheet of this accession or as an accession of its own. Éloise 04:45, 7 October 2026 (+07)
The collector's own account
Thomson's narrative, Western Himalaya and Tibet (1852), has one paragraph on hemp. It describes the Kashmir valley in October 1848 (p. 455); it does not mention herbarium specimens. The article sets the passage beside the pencil word beginning Kashm on the mount and the heavy fruit of the stems, which fit a gathering in Kashmir late in the season, but no source ties this sheet to Kashmir or to that October, so the pairing is not stated as a fact and the locality field stays empty. Thomson was in Kashmir from 5 October 1848 and reached Lahore by way of Jammu on 16 December (pp. 454–455). Éloise 22:23, 20 October 2026 (+07)