Publication and orthography of Pycreus mundii (Cyperaceae)

Abstract

Johannes Ludwig Leopold was born in Berlin in 1791. He trained as a pharmacist and served as a field apothecary in the Prussian Army during the Napoleonic Wars. Later he was sent with Louis Maire to the Cape as official plant collector for the Prussian government, arriving in Cape Town on 13 October 1816 (Gunn & Codd, 1981). Some ten years after his arrival, set up as a land surveyor based in Swellendam, where he evidently continued collecting plant specimens. On his death in 1831, his personal herbarium went to Ecklon, who distributed it further. Several species epithets commemorate this rather less than perfect collector, and these are sometimes spelled with a t. Available evidence, in the form of letters to Hooker signed L. Mund shows that he himself did not use this form. Gunn & Codd (1981) remark that epithets e.g. mundtii ... should be corrected to mundii. This opinion was evidently based on Art. 60.1 of the current edition of the ICBN (Greuter & al., 2000), and is reinforced by Art. 60 Ex. 20 where it is explicitly stated that the epithet pissarti is to be corrected to pissardii, in a name commemorating one M. Pissard. We wish to draw attention to one particular case which came to light in the course of studies for a forthcoming publication on southern African aquatic and wetland plants. Here a specific epithet commemorating Mr. has been consistently misspelled (except in recent publications from PRE), and moreover the citation of the protologue in Index Kewensis (Jackson, 1895), and hence in the International Plant Names Index (IPNI) (http://www.ipni.org/), is also in error.