Page 21 - Black Range Naturalist, Vol. 2, No. 2
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 Penstemon metcalfei
Elmer Ottis Wooton and Paul Carpenter Standley begin “Some hitherto undescribed plants from New Mexico” with “During the summer of 1904 and the spring of 1905, Mr. O. B. Metcalfe made a botanical collection of some six or seven hundred numbers about the south end of the Black Range in Grant and Sierra counties of New Mexico. The region is one that was almost unknown botanically before that time.” p. 105 (Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, Volume 36, pp. 105 - 112). At page 112, the initial description of Penstemon metcalfei, under its original designation, Pentstemon puberulus, is found (see right).
At page 21 of Volume 1, Number 1, of this newsletter there is an article about O. B. Metcalfe.
Scrophularia macrantha
The Harvard University Herbaria maintains many of the specimens collected by O. B. Metcalfe, including the specimen sheet shown below. A specimen of Scrophularia coccinea (later to become
       good. The specimen sheet, however, indicates that it is the type specimen. How is it that this specimen is a “a type specimen” when the specimen of S. coccinea (to be S. macrantha) collected by Charles Wright in 1851-2, is shown on the next page of this newsletter, as a “Type”?
“The scientific name of every taxon is almost always based on one particular specimen.” The initial description of a plant named S. coccinea (the basionym or original name) was published in 1753. That plant is now classified as Russelia coccinea. In 1859, Asa Gray used the specimen on the following page to describe the subject species as S. coccinea. In 1910 E. L. Greene described S. macrantha based on the specimen to the left and it is that name which applies to the subject species. In 1962, S. neomexicana, was described by Shaw. All of these names have type specimens.
In the December 6, 2005 issue of The New Mexico Botanist, Eugene Jercinovic, writes a short biography about Edward Lee Greene (a great read, candid) which includes a listing of the plant species found in New Mexico which Greene originally described and their current naming.
      S. macrantha) collected by Metcalfe on Santa Rita Mt. at the south end of the Black Range on October 9, 1904. So far, so
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