Talk:Steinheil s.n., Bône (1834)
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Discussion for: Steinheil s.n., Bône (1834) • View • Links • Related changes
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Discussion
Evidentiary scope
The catalogue records a place, a year and a name. It says nothing about cultivation, wild growth, use, habitat or a local name and it carries no altitude. The accession is classified Other on that silence. It establishes the presence of Cannabis sativa at Bône in 1834 and nothing beyond that: no stand, no landrace and no living holding. No conservation priority is assigned.
The sheet is the earliest Algerian cannabis specimen the survey found and the earliest in the wiki's Algerian corpus. That is a statement about the corpus, not about the history of the plant in Algeria and it is deliberately kept off the article.
The label has not been read
Three images of this sheet are published with the GBIF occurrence, but the host that serves them, `mediaphoto.mnhn.fr`, sits behind a bot check that refuses automated requests and so does the catalogue's own item page at `science.mnhn.fr`. Neither a scripted fetch nor the in-app browser can reach them. The article therefore rests on the catalogue's own transcription of the label, republished through GBIF and not on a reading of the sheet.
This matters for one field in particular. The locality is stored as Bone without a circumflex, while the same catalogue writes Guémar, Périmètre and Cultivé with their accents, so the unaccented form is unlikely to be a database limitation. Whether the sheet itself reads Bone or Bône is unresolved. The title uses Bône, the form the place carried in French throughout the colonial period and the form Isidore Dukerley printed in 1866.
Everything in the article that would normally come off the label, such as a habitat note, an altitude, a vernacular name or a determination slip, is absent here because the label has not been seen, not because the label is bare. The batch package records this as ruling R2 and the follow-ups list re-reading the sheet once an image is in hand.
Georeferencing
Bône is present-day Annaba, the seat of Annaba Province. The catalogue gives no site within the town, no altitude and no habitat, so no coordinate or elevation is asserted. The infobox uses the present-day province and locality names, with the label's Bone quoted in the article.
Editorial treatment
The date is stored as the year alone. The catalogue holds it as the span 1 January to 31 December 1834, which is how this publisher encodes a year-only date; the same encoding appears on Barat s.n., Sig (1850), while Durando s.n., Sig (1850) carries a genuine seasonal span and the later sheets carry full days. Reading the 1834 span as a real day range would be wrong.
The date passes the lifespan test. Adolphe Steinheil lived from 1810 to 1839, so 1834 falls within his working life and not after his death, which is the trap that moved Griffith 4686 (by 1845) to a by title.
The collector field takes A. de Steinheil from the catalogue's Steinheil, A. de. The full-name biography would sit at Adolphe Steinheil.
These notes were recorded during accession preparation. Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 08:11, 18 September 2026 (+07)