LITHOPARIAN RECOLLECTIONS - Part 9 by Des & Naureen Coie

摘要

26 June to 22 July 1970: When Des failed to get answers to his many questions about Lithops early on, he was referred to Professor G.C. Nel's book on Lithops. He found Nel's book to be full of contradictions and errors, and he decided that the only way to sort things out would be to collect type-locality material whenever possible and to go back to original descriptions and publications. This entailed a lot of searching through libraries, archives and old records. One of the most important was the report of the first Lithops to be discovered. It is now 195 years since William John Burchell 'picked up from the stony ground a curiously shaped pebble', but which 'proved to be a plant, and an additional new species to the numerous tribe of Mesembryanthemum'. That is how Burchell described his finding of the first Lithops, on 14 September 1811, somewhere between Keikams Poort and the Orange River, at a place called 'Zand Valley'.