vs> x^^ Vo., 56, pp. 57-66 June 16, 1943 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHJ A NOTE ON RAFINESQUE'S FLORULA COLUMBICA. BY ELBERT L. LITTLE, JR., Forest Service, United States Department of Agriculture. In connection with the current work on a new Washington-Baltimore flora by the Conference on the District Flora, it may be of historical interest to recall that the first local flora of the District of Columbia was an unpublished and now lost manuscript, Florula Columbica, prepared in 1804 by Constantine S. Rafinesque (1783-1840), when he was only about twenty-one years old. Rafinesque, a brilliant but eccentric genius and naturalist, was ignored by his contemporaries. However, his work, both good and bad, is now becoming more fairly evaluated and better appreciated. One of the greatest splitters in the history of American botany, he described very briefly hundreds of new genera and thousands of new species of plants of eastern United States and added to the confusion of nomenclature. The Florula Columbica was written on his first trip to the United States, from April 1802 to Decem-ber 1804. After spending the next ten years in Sicily, Rafinesque returned to the United States in 1815 and made this country his home until his death in 1840. Not much information about Rafinesque' s lost Florula Columbica is available, and its contents are almost com-pletely unknown. However, additional notes and papers of Rafinesque are still being located. The discovery of some very interesting records of Rafinesque after 1815, including manuscripts, notebooks, and letters, was reported by Pennell 13— Proc. Biol. Soc. Wash., Vop. 56, 1943. (57)
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