From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 1 from January 2005.
By Dan H. Nicolson
On 18 November, Frederick ‘Ted’ Bayer, Curator of Invertebrate Zoology for more than 40 years, made a gift to Botany. It is a small, original watercolor, annotated in pencil, “Bauhinia: Yellow Ebony Vine, Biak, near Sarido - 11 April [19]45.” Bayer was then stationed on Biak, an island off the back of the “bird’s head” of New Guinea.
The gift included two letters. One was dated 3 June 1945 from W. M. Buswell (Coral Gables, Florida), which said, “I received the Bauhinia specimen but haven’t been able to name it yet.” The other letter, dated 27 July 1946, is to Bayer (then living in Florida) from E. D. Merrill (then at the Arnold Arboretum):
“Dr. Walker of the Smithsonian Institution has sent me a very nice photographic print of your sketch of the New Guinea plant [that] I determined for Prof. Buswell as Bauhinia lingua DC. The latter was described from specimens collected on Amboina Island, and we have one collection of it from Amboina; yours was the first record from New Guinea, and the first record of the species from outside of the small island of Amboina which is not far from the west end of New Guinea.
“This photograph will be placed with the specimen in our herbarium, for Prof. Buswell kindly gave us the latter.”
Seeing all this, Dan Nicolson checked the herbarium and, sure enough, Egbert Walker (former curator of Old World botany) had mounted the photograph (Neg. 37411-C), annotated the black and white photo with color notes. Nicolson found that the Smithsonian also had only one specimen of the species, a collection made in Amboina in 1913 by C.B. Robinson, who was killed there, but that is another story.
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