Index to Species in the Gleason and Wurdack Notebooks
Henry Allan Gleason started a series of notebooks in the 1920s that contain his records of many known species of Neotropical Melastomataceae. These records are comprised of drawings of dissected flowers, transcriptions of the original descriptions, notes or photographs of types, leaf venation rubbings, etc., for each species. As he studied and described new taxa, more drawings were added to the notebooks. The notebooks were given on “permanent loan” to John Wurdack in the 1950s, and he kept adding records on newly described species, both by him and other researchers. The 13 notebooks are now in the library archive of the NYBG. In total, these notebooks contain invaluable records for close to 3000 Neotropical species of Melastomataceae, with over 1000 of them containing drawings of careful flower and fruit dissections. Gleason and Wurdack rarely provided illustrations in the publication of their new taxa, and often there were no explanations as to why a new taxon was being recognized, why they chose to assign it to a given genus, or even how genera should be circumscribed. However, for many of the species described by Gleason or Wurdack, there are notes on the notebooks on the rationale behind their taxonomic decisions. Between the two of them, they described or re-circumscribed over 2000 species of Neotropical Melastomataceae, which constitute over 55% of currently recognized taxa. Therefore, these notebooks provide the only insight into how taxonomic decisions were made for the majority of the species of this large family during the last 70 years. Because the majority of the specimens used for all of the drawings are cited in the notebooks, and many of them are housed in the NY herbarium we have been able to link the notes and drawing to specific herbarium specimens in the KE Emu database. Wurdack also often drew flower dissections directly onto the specimen sheets and we estimate that over 1000 of these are housed at NY and US and we will be working to add those shortly.