Gyalidea roseola . [Descriptions of Fungi and Bacteria].

A description is provided for Gyalidea roseola, a lichen-forming fungus occurring on rock in natural and undisturbed environments and also on mining spoil. Some information on its dispersal and transmission and conservation status is given, along with details of its geographical distribution (Austria, Finland, Italy, Sweden, UK and Canada (British Columbia)) and associated organisms and substrata (lead mining spoil, rock (calcareous, schist, siliceous), soil and Cystococcus- or Leptosira-like photobionts).

“Useful Knowledge” in Charles-Alexandre Lesueur’s visual and textual accounts of Missouri in 1826

Artist and naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778-1846) valued his work as useful to science generally and to France in particular, including during the time he lived and traveled in North America from 1816 to 1837. Starting with Daniela Bleichmar’s concept of “visual epistemology: a way of knowing based on visuality, encompassing both observation and representation,” this essay claims that Lesueur’s art and scientific practice adhered closely to a belief in the authority of art from direct observation in nature, and they served different professional, educational, community, and potentially commercial purposes. It charts the conditions under which he produced the art, the purpose(s) of the art, the types of art (sketches, paintings, prints, landscape drawings), and the intended audience through four types of subjects from the expedition to Missouri in 1826: the challenges of scientific fieldwork, Blacks in Missouri, lead mining, and inland but especially riverside towns.

Lead Mining, Conservation and Heritage: Shaping a Mountain in Northeast Wales

This article discusses the shaping of Halkyn Mountain, an upland common in the county of Flintshire in northeast Wales. Extractive industry has had a dramatic impact on the area, and it was one of Britain’s major lead mining regions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This extractive history is essential for understanding its contemporary character and is a key element of community identity and local heritage production. The mountain is a multilayered landscape that has been made and transformed by geomorphological and human action, by subterranean water flow, digging, burrowing and extraction, by internal rupture and the upheaval and movement of earth and rock, and by grazing, burning, clearing and churning up the surface. It continues to be shaped by management and conservation, by the lifeworlds of plants and animals, and by perspectives on what constitutes a landscape. Drawing from current anthropological research in Flintshire on the making and shaping of place, the article explores how Halkyn Mountain exemplifies the contested nature—and the contradictions and provocations—of landscape and the difficulties inherent in using, living on, defining and managing a place that has been reshaped by industry, but one that is continually coming into being. It does so through a consideration of the area as a landscape shaped and given form by lead mining, by multispecies encounters, by land management and conservation initiatives, and by how notions of heritage inform local identity and regional preservation.

Finding’s Keeping

This chapter explains the discovery of lead mineral deposits and development of lead mining in southwest Missouri in the 1850s. Far from markets and transportation networks, working miners discovered and claimed rich deposits of lead mineral in this isolated region in the midst of a national market revolution that made lead more profitable than ever. Their discoveries soon attracted the attention of lead-starved smelting companies from St. Louis and elsewhere that tried to take control of the mineral wealth from the miners, most of whom were white men. The miners resisted corporate control because they believed that the mines rightfully belonged to them by virtue of discovering and developing them. By the time of the Civil War, miners and the smelting companies had negotiated a compromise based on leasing. Miners worked leasehold mines and sold their lead mineral to smelting companies for favorable prices, thus preserving the rights and privileges of the men who discovered the lead, and also creating good opportunities for miners who moved to the area. While the war devastated mining in the region, the companies rebuilt the mining district after the war by reinstating the favorable terms for working miners.