Talk:Chevalier 42218 (1931)

Talk

Discussion for: Chevalier 42218 (1931) • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Chevalier 42218 (1931) is about a single collection of cannabis, a seed lot or a herbarium specimen: where and when it was gathered, by whom, and what the sources say about the plants.

Data verification

Check the main page for documentation tier status. Discuss coordinate accuracy, photo quality, or collection details here.

Discussion

Evidentiary scope

Chevalier's label reads Adrar, cultivé (Adrar, cultivated), under number 42218 and the date 31 December 1931. The catalogue gives the locality as Adrar and leaves out the cultivation note. The label says nothing about who grew the plant, for what use or under what local name, and it carries no altitude. Drug-type cannabis from different regions began to be cross-bred, and its seed carried into old growing areas, in the 1970s (McPartland and Small 2020, pp. 84–85), so a hybrid origin is not considered for a sheet gathered in 1931. The accession is classified Landrace, by inference from the label. The sheet does not show what became of the crop or whether its seed survives, and no conservation priority is assigned.

Adrar is the deepest Saharan locality in the Algerian series. Chevalier published extensively on his collecting; anything he wrote about the Touat in 1931 and 1932 would be the natural place to find what was grown there and for what.

Label reading

Read from the museum's scan at full resolution (4912 × 7360 pixels).

Field label. Printed AUG. CHEVALIER. and Plantes de l'Afrique Occidentale Française (joined on the label by a dash), the last three words struck through and Territoires du Sud algérien written above. In manuscript: n^o 42.218 / Cannabis sativa L. / s. sp. C. indica L. / 31 - 12 after a printed 19 and 31 / Adrar, cultivé / printed Coll. with A. Chevalier.
Museum label. Printed HERB. MUS. PARIS.; in manuscript Cannabis sativa L. s.sp. C. indica L.; printed Entré le, left blank.
Stamp. EX HERBIER ETHNOBOTANIQUE. Heading at the top of the sheet: printed HERBIER AUG. CHEVALIER.
Barcode. Herbier Muséum Paris P00957683. A colour chart and a grey grid frame the scan.

The cultivation note and the subspecies are the two facts the catalogue leaves out. The last letter after indica is read as L. with a trailing stroke.

This sheet's only published image is issued under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, credited to Fabrice Clermont. That licence allows the wiki to host the image unaltered with credit for a non-commercial purpose. Resizing for display counts as a permitted technical modification; what the licence forbids is sharing a cropped or edited version, so no crop of the label is uploaded.

The date

31 December is the shape a year-only date usually takes when a database demands a day, so the catalogued 1931-12-31 was tested before being stored. The label settles it: it writes the date 31 - 12 in manuscript and completes the printed 19 with 31.

The date passes the lifespan test: Auguste Chevalier lived from 1873 to 1956.

The collection number

This is the one sheet of the Algerian series whose catalogue entry carries a gathering number; the other nine are s.n. The label writes it n^o 42.218.

The catalogue puts 42218 in the field for a field number and not in the field for a collector number. Chevalier numbered his gatherings in one running series and a number in the forty thousands is consistent with his fieldwork of the early 1930s, so the title takes the standard collector number form and not the s.n. plus locality form the other Algerian sheets use. The alternative title would be Chevalier s.n., Adrar (1931).

Georeferencing

Adrar is the seat of Adrar Province. The label reads Adrar, cultivé and gives no site within the oasis. The point 27.87, −0.29 is the town of Adrar, OpenStreetMap node 3999497924. The town's mapped residential area reaches 5.3 km from the point, and the palm gardens mapped beside it (way 1357889222) lie within 3.6 km; 1 km is added for the rounding of the point. The commune (French Wikipedia, Adrar (Algérie): 633 km²) is far larger than the town and is not used. It places the gathering at Adrar, not at a garden within it. The label carries no altitude or habitat, so no elevation is asserted. An earlier version of this note gave no point because the catalogue gives no site within the oasis. Basis: settlement point. Uncertainty: about 7 km.

Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 08:12, 18 September 2026 (+07)