BOTANICAL LIBRARIES AND HERBARIA IN NORTH-AMERICA .4. THE BUCKLEY,SAMUEL,BOTSFORD-DEAN,REBECCA,MANN MYSTERY

Samuel Botsford Buckley (1809-1884) amassed a herbarium of approximate ly 6000 specimens through his own labours and through exchange with ot her botanists, mostly American but also European. This herbarium was a cquired by Rebecca Mann Dean (1821-1890), a professor of natural histo ry and other subjects at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, and wi fe of a bookstore owner who had a brief row with Buckley in the 1850s. Before her death, she sold Buckley's herbarium to Washington Universi ty, St Louis, Missouri. Within a few years of the sale, the herbarium was combined with that of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Neither the b otanical activities of Buckley, which are fairly well understood, nor the nature of the transaction conveying the herbarium from Buckley to Dean, which is still problematic, could have been sketched without inf ormation contained in correspondence saved by botanical libraries and other scholarly institutions. The importance of keeping botanical libr aries and archives in close proximity to herbaria is reaffirmed by thi s case study.