Talk:Griffith 4686 (by 1845)
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Evidentiary scope
The printed label is headed Herbarium of the late East India Company. It carries the handwritten number 4686, the locality East Bengal and the attribution Herb. Griffith (from Griffith's herbarium), and its last line reads Distributed at the Royal Gardens, Kew. 1863-4. The label gives no collection date and no more precise locality, altitude or habitat, and it names no cultivation status, local name or use. A 1944 review by Chevalier, as the page reports, cited the number as spontané (growing wild) in Afghanistan; that is his reading of the number, not a note on this label, whose place is East Bengal. Nothing on the sheet shows whether the plant was cultivated, was growing wild or had escaped. The accession is classified Unknown. It does not establish a continuing population, and no conservation priority is assigned.
Georeferencing
No point is given. East Bengal is a historical region, larger than any province of today and divided between India and Bangladesh, and the label names no place within it. No province or district is asserted. An earlier version of this note rested the refusal on the region's name alone. The Naturalis occurrence record codes the country as India and the infobox follows it. The country is provisional: the label does not resolve the site against present-day boundaries, and Griffith's recorded collecting countries include both India and Bangladesh (JSTOR Global Plants).
Editorial treatment
The collection date is left blank. The label's only date is its last line, Distributed at the Royal Gardens, Kew. 1863-4. The year 1863 in the Naturalis occurrence record matches that distribution, not a gathering. William Griffith lived from 1810 to 1845 and his recorded collecting dates run from 1835 to 1845 (JSTOR Global Plants; IPNI author 3387-1), so no sheet from his herbarium can have been gathered in 1863. The Utrecht stamp dated 25 April 1967 records a later accession, not the gathering.
A Paris sheet, MNHN P06884263, is recorded as Cannabis sativa from East Bengal under Griffith, W., with the remark Donné par la Direction du Jardin Royal de Kew. 1863 (GBIF occurrence 731718307). It fits the same distribution. Its record gave no number when this note was written; it now gives 4686 (see Other sheets, below).
The page was moved from Griffith 4686 (1863) on 16 September 2026 so that the title no longer presents the distribution year as a collection year. Accession titles take the form Collector Number (Year). Where the gathering year is unknown but has a firm latest limit, the title reads (by YYYY) with that limit, here the year of Griffith's death. A sheet with no such limit would read (s.d.).
The collector is recorded as W. Griffith and the number as Griffith, W. 4686. The label's Herb. Griffith names Griffith's herbarium within the East India Company herbarium, and Griffith was a Company employee (JSTOR Global Plants). The MNHN record above also names Griffith, W.. The label does not say whether Griffith gathered this plant himself or received it from someone working for him, and it does not say whether he assigned the number 4686 or whether it was assigned for the distribution.
These notes were revised when the page was moved. Source citations remain in the article. Éloïse 22:28, 16 September 2026 (+07)
Other sheets
The Paris catalogue now gives P06884263 the collector Griffith, W., the number 4686 and the place East Bengal, with the note Donné par la Direction du Jardin Royal de Kew. 1863 (GBIF occurrence 731718307). Number, place and distribution all agree with this sheet's label, so the article names it as another sheet of 4686. Its image is behind the museum's browser check and has not been read; it is not shown, and the infobox keeps this sheet's values.
These notes were recorded during accession preparation. Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 05:01, 16 October 2026 (+07)
Source discrepancies
- Place of the number. This sheet's printed label reads East Bengal, and the Paris catalogue gives P06884263, number 4686, the same place. Auguste Chevalier's 1944 review of flax and hemp (Revue de botanique appliquée et d'agriculture coloniale 24) cites Griffith's nos 4685 et 4686 under Afghanistan (p. 64) and figures Herb. Griffiths n° 4686 as a wild female plant from Afghanistan (plate VII, fig. 2, p. 63). He was reviewing the Paris herbarium's sheets. The article gives both places; neither is preferred, and the locality field keeps the label's. Éloise 22:26, 20 October 2026 (+07)