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The Personal Herbarium of A.A. Heller 1896-1913
Between 1896 and 1913, Amos Arthur Heller and his wife, Gertrude, compiled a herbarium of over 10,000 specimens. Most of the collection was based on the Hellers' collections from eastern California and western Nevada, where they collected extensively between 1900 and 1913.
Arthur Heller collected many new species and published these along with descriptions of his other collections in his own journal, Muhlenbergia. Heller gave special attention to the lupines (Lupinus, Fabaceae).
Heller was friendly with many other western collectors. He worked with Patrick B. Kennedy at the Nevada Agricultural Experiment Station from 1908 to 1913, and the two sometimes went collecting together. He also corresponded with and published papers by S.B. Parish, T.D. A. Cockerell, G. Osterhout and others. Heller exchanged specimens with all of these collectors and kept the specimens in his personal herbarium.
The collection at Brooklyn does not contain all of Heller's specimens. The collections he made after 1913 are at the University of Washington, Seattle. The principal set of the collections he made while at the University of Nevada are there, and the collections he made in 1905 and 1906 for the California Academy of Sciences are in that herbarium.
Heller kept a few of his collections from before 1900 in his personal herbarium, but most are in other herbaria. Early collections are at the Field Museum of Natural History, Franklin and Marshall College, and New York Botanical Garden. Hawaiian collections from 1895 and 1895 are at the University of Minnesota and Bernice Bishop Museum. Puerto Rican collections from 1898 and 1899 are at NY.
A portion of the Heller collection is on loan to NY, where they have been temporarily filed with the general and type collections.
References
Most of Heller's new species and accounts of his collecting were published in his journal, Muhlenbergia.
There is an interesting account of Heller's early work and his development as a botanist in John Harshberger's 1899 The Botanists of Philadelphia, pp. 382-388.
There is a short section on Heller in Reveal and Pringle's article "Taxonomic Botany and Floristics" in Flora North America Vol. 1, pp. 157–193.
Arnold Thiem describes the work of Kennedy and Heller at the Nevada Agricultural Experiment Station in "Nevada Plant Types and their Collectors," Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden 77: 1–104.
Acknowledgments
We thank Dr. Arnold Thiem, of Reno, Nevada, for his help in locating the Heller types and for sharing information about Heller's collecting.