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John Macoun's Canadian Mosses
... I have been appointed botanist to the Expedition which is intended to explore the Rocky Mountain passes north of Lat 54 °—a region which is positively a terra incognita to the botanical world.
—John Macoun in a letter to Sereno Watson, March 1875.
Throughout his career, John Macoun had the opportunity to explore many areas of Canada that were then "terra incognita" and to collect plant specimens, which he sent to the leading botanists of that time. When he wrote to Sereno Watson in 1875, Macoun had already collected across Canada and was ready to embark on a second trip into the Rockies. Macoun was able to work alongside the survey and exploration teams that were preparing the way for the great Canadian railroads.
John Macoun
Some of his most important collections were made along the west coast of Canada and in the Canadian Rockies.
Macoun sent duplicates of many of his specimens to Watson, then at the Gray Herbarium of Harvard University. His lichen specimens went to James and Tuckerman, also at Harvard, and most of his moss specimens were sent to N.C. Kindberg, in Stockholm.
The Garden owns an excellent collection of Macoun's moss specimens, including isotypes for the species described by Kindberg from Macoun's collections.
References
The main set of Macoun's collections and most of the types are at the Canadian Museum of Nature, in Ottawa. The types for the mosses described by Kindberg are at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, in Stockholm.
Macoun's greatest work is his Catalogue of Canadian Plants, published in six volumes between 1883 and 1892 by the Geological Survey of Canada.
The Autobiography of John Macoun, M.A. Canadian Explorer and Naturalist, was published by the Ottawa Field Naturalists in 1922.
William Steere and H. Crum wrote two articles in 1997 on Macoun's mosses, which are critical for understanding the scientific relationship between Macoun and N.C. Kindberg. The first appeared in Memoirs of the New York Botanical Garden 28(2): 1-220, the second in Botanical Review 43: 287, 292, 299-302.