HOWARD, PIPERACEAE NOTES ON THE PIPERACEAE OF THE LESSER ANTILLES RICHARD A. HOWARD THE FOLLOWING NOTES were derived from a study of the Piperaceaein preparation for a flora of the Lesser Antilles. Casimir de Candollepublished an account of the family in Urban's Symbolae Antillanae in1902, recognizing 154 species and additional varieties in the Antilles. Sub-sequently numerous new taxa have been added by Urban, C. de Can-dolle, Trelease and Stehle, so the family stands today as one of the largerfamilies of the area, and one with a high percentage of endemic species.The difficulty of establishing a valid species concept within the familyand the existing overdescription of taxa is recognized. A treatment ofspecies from a small area is not a satisfactory and certainly not a scien-tific approach. No monographer is available, and one might ask if asingle lifetime would be enough to straighten out one of the worst messesin plant taxonomy. Subsequent to De Candolle's treatment in 1902 is his analytical keyto the Piperaceae published posthumously (Candollea 1: 65-415. 1923).In the period from 1930 to 1940 Henri Stehle collected extensively inthe French Islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique and sent his materialsto Trelease. Trelease supplied identifications which Stehle published ina variety of ways. Often the names alone were given as a list of the floraof an area or island (e.g., Flore de la Guadeloupe et Dependances 2(1):2, 3, 8. 1937), often with type collections cited, but since descriptionswere lacking, these names were nomina nuda. Stehle planned and ap-parently wrote a treatment of the family; however, only a part waspublished as "Flore descriptive des antilles francaises II, Les Piperales,Piperacees et Chloranthacees," Fascicule 1, 1-144. 1940. In various sub-sequent publications it is indicated that this work was completed. Thepart cited covers the three genera, Pothomorphe, Sarcorhachis, and Piper,and six of the 42 species of Peperomia included within a key to the genus.This appears to be an independent publication; however, it is one whichparallels but is more comprehensive than that of the Bulletin AgricoleMartinique (9(3): 145-221. 1941), a publication which cannot be lo-cated in libraries in the United States. Stehle prepared the illustrationsfor the unpublished part of this paper, and photographs of them are as-sociated with herbarium specimens in the Trelease collections at the Uni-versity of Illinois. A word of warning must be expressed over the in-consistencies or errors which exist between the specimens which Stehleand Trelease annotated, the early usually invalid publication, and thesubsequent publications. Trelease frequently used local place names asepithets. Both Trelease and Stehle have handwriting of difficult legibility.1973]
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