Talk:Cave s.n., Tista (1913)
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Evidentiary scope
The label carries a river name, an altitude, a collector and a day. There is no habitat note, no use, no local name and no statement about cultivation, so the accession is classified Other and carries no conservation priority. It documents Cannabis low in the Tista valley on 1 July 1913.
Georeferencing
Tista names the river, not a settlement. The label gives no district and no bank. The altitude of 1,000 feet, about 305 m, puts the gathering on the middle river: the Teesta passes that contour between the Sikkim boundary near Rangpo and the Darjeeling hills below.
The province is given as West Bengal on the day's other collecting. Cave's sheets of 1 July 1913 include a Solanum torvum georeferenced by RBGE to Rishap in the Darjeeling hills (GBIF occurrence 686673339), which places him on the West Bengal side that day. No district is asserted, because the two banks of the Teesta there lie in different districts and the label does not say which one the plant came from.
RBGE's own georeferencing of Cave's Tista sheets is not consistent: some carry Sikkim; two carry the note that the name could be anywhere along the river. That inconsistency is the reason for asserting no district. The coordinate is Teesta Bazaar in OpenStreetMap (node 4487551935), 27.07, 88.42: the named settlement on the reach where the river runs at the label's altitude, standing at about 276 m against the label's 1,000 feet, which is 305 m. It locates the sheet to that reach and no further. The qualifying stretch runs about 25 km up to the Sikkim boundary near Rangpo, so this is the loosest of the coordinates entered under the ruling, and it is a georeference for the reach rather than a reconstructed collection point.
Entered under R1 of the coordinate ruling of 18 September 2026, which georeferences a historical accession to the place its label names, at two decimal places, with the mapped object named above. The point locates this sheet to about 15 km, and the article's prose is unchanged. Éloise 06:11, 18 September 2026 (+07)
Editorial treatment
The title uses the label's Tista. The modern form is Teesta, which the article gives and links.
The label is a printed Edinburgh herbarium form and not a field slip, so the wording is the garden's, not the collector's. The date is written 1.7.1913 in the day-month-year order the series uses throughout.
George Herbert Cave was curator of the Lloyd Botanic Garden at Darjeeling from 1904 to 1928 (RBGE Botanics Stories). That note gives his dates as 1872 to 1965 while IPNI gives 1870 to 1965; the article states neither, since nothing here turns on them.
These notes were recorded during accession preparation. Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 04:44, 18 September 2026 (+07)