>3,000 Specimens
There has been no effort to assemble an active algal collection in the Department of Botany. However, the UW Herbarium does contain several valuable items: 1) a complete set, bound in 46 fascicles (volumes), of Collins, Holden and Setchell’s Phycotheca Boreali-Americana (1895-1919), this containing fully 2300 specimens; 2) a set of Josephine Tilden’s American Algae bound in 7 volumes (cent. I-VII, pt. 1, 1894-1909), containing 700 specimens; and 3) a single unidentified specimen from the Howgate Polar Expedition of 1877-1878. There are also Characeae in packets mounted on sheets (145 US, 35 Latin America, and ca. 150 Old World, these collected in the 1800’s by E. Wunderly and Alexander Braun, the latter a specialist in this group). Because the present departmental emphasis is on the biology of freshwater algae, the Botany Department maintains living cultures of particular groups, such as Chlamydomonas, Cladophora, and Coleochaete, as part of special studies carried out by Professor Linda Graham and her students. Even though G. M. Smith published a series of papers dealing specifically with the algae of Wisconsin, including the two-volume The Phytoplankton of the Inland Lakes of Wisconsin (1920, 1924), no specimens at WIS voucher this classical work. A rare resource to be mentioned is Josephine Tilden’s dated but still valuable author and subject Bibliography of Algology of some 20,000 cards in 54 drawers, printed between 1900 and the 1930’s.