S. W. Williams’ Relations with Asa Gray: Lifelong Friendship, Botany and Sinology

Samuel Wells Williams was a well-known missionary, diplomat and sinologist. In his whole life, he never gave up his pursuit on botany, however, there was not much attention to his botanical accomplishment. Williams had a lifelong friendship with Asa Gray, who was the most distinguished American botanist in the 19th century. And because of the contact, Williams related with botany indeed. In order to figure out their friendship and influence, this article is going to use the correspondences between Williams and Gray, besides the related publications. This article first presents Williams’ lifelong friendship with Gray, then, accounts for the plants and seeds which Williams gave to Gray. Finally, it will demonstrate the influence of Gray towards Williams’ contact with Ko Kun-hua, who was the first professor of Chinese descent at Harvard University.

Naming a genus for William Darlington: a case study in botanical eponymy

In 1853, the American botanist John Torrey described a new genus of pitcher plant, naming it Darlingtonia (Sarraceniaceae). The plant had been collected near Mount Shasta in California in 1841 by William Brackenridge, a member of the Wilkes Expedition. The name honoured William Darlington (1782–1863), a Pennsylvania physician and botanist who had traded information and specimens with Torrey for many years. Darlington considered a genus eponym as a distinct honour. The genus name Darlingtonia, however, had been used twice before, but the plants were shown to belong to Desmanthus (Leguminosae) and Styrax (Styracaceae). A letter in the William Darlington Herbarium at West Chester University, Pennsylvania, reveals Torrey's efforts to ease Darlington's fears that the same fate would befall the name of the Californian pitcher plant.

Medicine and Morality in the Ho Family in Lijiang

I travelled to the Lijiang basin area of Yunnan province in the spring of 2014 to record and explore the ‘traditional’ knowledge and practice of Chinese medicine among the Ho family. The Ho family includes three generations of herbalists who combine Naxi medicinal plants, Chinese medicine diagnostics, and knowledge of Western medicine in their clinical practice. They have also created their own herbarium of over 1000 local plants, which they organise based on modern botanical nomenclature. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Austrian-American botanist and explorer Joseph Rock introduced Latin botanical names to the father of Ho Shixiu, currently the oldest living Ho family member. The son of Ho Shixiu, Ho Shulong, who is now its primary caretaker, however, informed us that he was influenced by books as much as by his father’s oral teachings about medicinal plants. The youngest member of this lineage is a graduate of Yunnan Chinese Medicine University and acknowledges that his knowledge base in local ecology and medicinal plants must increase if he is to carry on the lineage. My aim is to describe both the unique aspects of the Ho family’s knowledge and its transmission, and the cultural and medical elements that have influenced and enriched them. From my perspective, these different types knowledge seem to sustain and give meaning to their family-based practice lineage. I argue that we need to carry out more ethnographic work in order to understand the relationship between medical knowledge and practice, and its social, historical, and cultural context. I hope this field note is a step in that direction.

Can We Predict Species Invasions?

Can we predict which species will become invasive if they are introduced? Asa Gray, the great 19th-century American botanist, contended that impacts of invasions cannot be predicted, and invasion biologists from Charles Elton onward have lamented how hard it is to foresee what a...