Volume 13 – Issue 4 (Dec 1948)

Little botanizing has been done in the west central part of West Virginia because most botanists seem to be more interested in the mountain flora found in the eastern portion of the State. Probably the first collecting trip through the west central counties was reported by C. F. Millspaugh in 1891. The specimens he collected are on file in the Herbarium at West Virginia University. Few, if any, plant collections from this area were made after 1891 until the summer of 1924 when P. D. Strausbaugh from West Virginia University collected a few plants.

The streams, originating in the mountains of Virginia, that give rise to the James River, flow through a region that, from the standpoint of plant geography, is one of the most interesting sections of the world.

The real beginning in research on freshwater algae of southeastern United States, although incidental reports had been made previously, was the trip which Jacob Bailey took for his health during the winter of 1849-50. This professor at the United States Military Academy enjoyed his trip and related the pleasure of being in the collecting grounds of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida in a personal chatty manner that has at some time since then disappeared from scientific literature. His microscopical observations, published in the second volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 1851, included not only freshwater forms, but marine as well and some organisms that are now considered definitely of the animal kingdom. From sixty sites, only a half dozen filamentous forms were listed under the name “Algae”, but there were over one hundred desmids and about the same number of diatoms, less than a quarter of which were freshwater