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 printed label gives a region, a vegetation zone and a collector. It gives nothing else: no date, no number, no altitude, no habitat and no use. The accession is classified Other and carries no conservation priority. 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 in the naming convention. 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.
These notes were recorded during accession preparation. Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 04:43, 18 September 2026 (+07)